


Stolen Moments, Secret Plans

by usurpingwomen



Series: A One-Time Thing [2]
Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Bathtub Sex, Behind the Scenes, Cuddling, Did someone order more pining, Drunk Wisdom, Episode: s14e08 Lessons Learned, Episode: s14e16 Funny Valentine, Episode: s14e17 Undercover Blue, Episode: s14e18 Legitimate Rape, Episode: s14e20 Girl Dishonored, Episode: s14e24 Her Negotiation, Episode: s15e21 Post-Mortem Blues, Episode: s16e05 Pornstar's Requiem, Episode: s16e08 Spousal Privilege, Episode: s16e10 Forgiving Rollins, Episode: s16e16 December Solstice, Episode: s16e19 Granting Immunity, Episode: s16e23 Surrendering Noah, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I'm not gonna tag praise kink but, Massage, Pining, Things will be less of a bummer soon, Valentine's Day, You know what it is, canon-typical references to violence, sex things
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-06-21 23:28:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 31,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15568722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/usurpingwomen/pseuds/usurpingwomen
Summary: A series of one-shots and deleted scenes from between the chapters and events of "A One-Time Thing." Barba and Benson lust, pine, savor stolen moments, and make secret plans during their time together working on cases for Manhattan SVU.





	1. Chapter 1

“With all due respect, this was a waste of time. I’m a prosecutor, not a healer,” he had told her. 

Ten minutes later, he still felt guilty about it, but he wasn’t sure why. Strictly speaking, it was true. She had pulled him out of his office in the middle of the day and dragged him all the way out to the Bronx, just to intimidate a bunch of old white guys with enough money to buy their own private prison if it came to that, for a case that was well past the statute of limitations and had few, if any, viable, competent, living defendants. Rita Calhoun had called their meeting a fishing expedition, and that was Rita pulling her punches. It _was_ a waste of time, time they both could have used to work on cases he could actually win.

_Then why did you agree to go?_ asked a small, sarcastic voice in the back of his mind. He rolled his eyes. He knew why he went. 

Because Olivia Benson had asked.

Now he was trapped in the confines of her decrepit squad car, fighting unexpected traffic and the rumblings of a migraine, trying to ignore the intimate memories brought on by the sound of her softly swearing under her breath and the smell of her shampoo. It had been two months since they spent the night together, and his throat still got tight when she walked into a room. It was sometimes uncomfortable, but not altogether unpleasant. He liked working with her, the way she challenged him, the way he stretched himself to impress her. He hazarded a glance over at her in the driver’s seat and bit back a groan. She had haphazardly combed a hand through her hair and leaned an elbow on the driver’s side window, lifting her hair off her shoulders and exposing her neck to him in profile. He tried to stop himself from remembering the taste of her skin, just there. He looked away.

He was quiet for most of the drive, alternately trying to concentrate on making the case and cursing himself for trying to make a case where the logical parts of his mind knew there wasn’t one. Not from a legal standpoint, anyway. She was right that a crime had been committed, he was sure, but they were bound by the confines of the legal system, confines she seemed to believe he could Houdini their way out of whenever he wanted.

“Listen,” he said finally. “I know why you’re doing this. I saw in your notes and in our interview how the abuse affected these victims, and it’s… It’s awful. Appalling. But the evidence is old, the statutes have passed…. The witness testimony is good, but without concrete evidence that the school had knowledge of the abuse, I just don’t see a way to win here. I’m sorry.” 

He expected her to argue with him, but she smiled. 

“What?” he asked, making his voice exasperated but finding himself half-smiling back against his will.

“You say that every time,” she said, shaking her head, “but I bet you’ll have an indictment by this time next week.”

There it was. The challenge. The impossible expectations, the unnerving confidence that he wouldn’t let her down. There was no reason for her to have this much faith in him after working together for only two months, and yet here she was, revealing herself to be a believer.

“Besides,” she continued, “that’s not the point. It’s about acknowledging that something terrible happened at Manor Hill and helping people find a way to move past it. A verdict would be nice, and I have no doubt you’ll get one, but that’s not what this is about.” They inched forward, following the crawling traffic ahead of them.

“I’m a prosecutor, Detective Benson. It’s always about the verdict.” 

Infuriatingly, she smiled at him again. “You don’t believe that.”

“I’m a _prosecutor_ ,” he repeated, incredulous this time.

“Are you trying to convince me, or yourself, Counselor?” She finally turned away from the traffic and looked into his eyes. “You’re a _good_ prosecutor,” she corrected him. “You’re not like that. If you were, I wouldn’t have asked you here.” They were quiet for a beat, then she continued, “Actually, if I thought you were like that, I wouldn’t have asked you out.” Her eyebrow was cocked, and he thought he saw the hint of another, different kind of challenge in her eyes.

Her words sent an arrow of heat low through his belly. “If memory serves, Detective, I asked you,” he said, his voice quiet and low.

“That’s cute, Counselor,” she responded, suddenly too chipper, her eyes back on the road. “You thought it was your idea.”

He laughed, and some of the tension from the meeting dissipated. There was a new kind of tension in the car now, and his body was strung tight. They hadn’t acknowledged what had happened between them since the morning they woke up, since she kissed him affectionately, sweetly, as he walked out her apartment door, her hair still damp from their shower. He wasn’t sure what she meant to do by bringing it up now, but he found himself deliciously tormented by the friction in the air between them. 

He pictured himself kissing her. It would be easy, here, in this enclosed space, in stopped traffic, away from prying eyes and conflicts of interest and responsibilities, just for a stolen moment. He could lean toward her, place his lips just below her ear, watch goosebumps gather over her skin. He could lace his fingers through her hair, tuck her bottom lip between his teeth, pull tiny moans out of her mouth. His hand could wander, down her neck, to her waist, under her blouse, against the smooth skin of her hips.

The car started moving again, and they were finally out of the bottlenecked traffic. He let the fantasy that had gripped him fade, and he got out his phone, busying himself, distracting himself, reminding himself that there was work to do. He could convince himself that his complicated, overwhelming, _inappropriate_ desire for Olivia Benson’s praise was healthy, as long as it motivated him, pushed him to be better and do better work. But on days like today, when he was driven to distraction by her requests, her challenges, her intoxicating smell—he was going to have to find a way to work around his feelings on days like today. 

When they got out of the car, the cold October wind bit into his cheeks and knuckles. He let it whip around him like a cold shower, pulling him back to the matter at hand. The impossible case, God help him. 

"You ready, Counselor?" she asked. "We have a case to win."

He smiled again and followed her up the stairs, letting her faith galvanize him into action.

He got the indictment. She won the bet.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barba gets bad news.
> 
> This should have been an Olivia chapter but I like his POV too much.

Barba blew out a breath and put his head in his hands, replaying the (terrible, awkward, uncomfortable, mildly devastating) conversation he had just suffered through with Benson and Amaro before Olivia stormed out of his office, trailing Amaro behind her. When Carmen told him Benson was coming to talk to him, a hint of a pitying smirk on her face, he knew it would be ugly, but he’d had no idea. 

Things had gone downhill fast. Starting with Olivia telling him that in fact, she could confirm the presence of an intimate scar on Cassidy’s inner left thigh. 

“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about,” she said gently, hesitantly, and he found himself surprised at the hurt bubbling up in his belly. He tamped it down.

“Ah,” was all he trusted himself to say, and then, “current or former relationship?”

“Both,” she said reluctantly, “with a thirteen-year gap.”

So that was that. Olivia Benson was seeing someone. Specifically, she was seeing Brian Cassidy, a cop who had an affair with a sex worker while undercover and was now accused of sexually assaulting another woman. Perfect. 

He remembered Cassidy’s animosity from the day before, when he was such a jackass during witness prep that Barba exploded at him, saying, “Look, I wish you weren’t my witness, you wish you weren’t my witness, but here we are, so let’s get through this.” In the moment, he thought Cassidy was just embarrassed that he would be bringing up his indiscretions in open court, but now he wondered if Cassidy’s attitude was rooted in more personal issues. He wondered what Olivia had said about him. About them.

And Olivia. He supposed some of her more recent behavior made sense too. They still went to dinner, still flirted and joked in his office and at the bar. She wasn’t even really subtle about it. He remembered how he had almost choked on his dinner one night when she had purred, in front of God and Amaro and everyone, “Come on, Barba. You can be very persuasive when you want to be.” He still caught her staring at him, from time to time. He could tell she liked watching him button and unbutton his suit jacket, so he did it as often as possible, taking his time, teasing a little. There was tension between them. At least, he had thought so.

But things always seemed to stop just shy of where he thought they might be headed. He had been telling himself that she didn’t want to complicate their professional relationship, and he tried to convince himself that he didn’t either. But this made a little more sense.

He remembered walking home with her one night a few weeks ago after she gave a particularly excellent seminar about escalation in domestic violence and the importance of early intervention. She was still fired up from her speech, still proselytizing about the need for changes in NYPD procedure surrounding domestic violence calls and increased sentencing for domestic abusers. He interjected occasionally to agree with her, but he really didn’t need to; she was in a world all her own. Mostly, he watched in awe, wondering how she could talk about her experiences witnessing other people’s terror, pain, and degradation, and still believe that she could make it better, make a difference, after all these years. He knew too many cops who were jaded, cynical, and callous, and those cops would never see half of what she had already witnessed, but she still had so much hope. 

When they made it to her apartment, he had to grab her arm, to stop her before she strolled right past her building. She stopped in the middle of her sentence and looked around, seemingly surprised. Then she looked back at him. They were standing close, eye to eye. He liked that they were the same height. He could see each of her individual eyelashes fluttering right across from his. Her cheeks were flushed from the brisk walk and her exhilaration, and he couldn’t help thinking that she looked so pretty, so sure, so alive. 

“I talked your ear off,” she said playfully, and he shrugged.

“I liked it,” he responded simply, trying to hide a half-smile. 

She smiled back. They were still standing so close. He thought about leaning in.

He’d thought about leaning in, leaning over, leaning down, at least a dozen times since they’d started working together regularly, but this was the closest he had ever come to acting on it. Outside her apartment, with the light of the streetlamps reflecting in her eyes, his hand still on her arm, he wanted to kiss her. Her eyes flickered, and for a second, he thought maybe she wanted that, too. 

Then she stepped back. “Hey, thanks for coming tonight,” she said, smiling and grasping his forearm with her hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

He smiled and tucked his hands in his pockets. “Of course. Detective.” He nodded his goodbye and walked the rest of the way home to clear his head. 

Now that he knew about Cassidy, it made a little more sense. Her hesitation with him, maybe Cassidy’s aggression toward him. He was glad he hadn’t kissed her again, and glad that she brought Amaro with her when she told him about Cassidy, so they didn’t have to talk about it. If there was one thing worse than stewing on it, it would be talking about it.

At least Strauss was taking over the case. Prosecuting his… _colleague’s_ significant other for rape would complicate a lot of relationships that were already too complicated as it was. It almost made him miss Brooklyn.

Carmen knocked on his door, and he lifted his head out of his hands and smoothed his suit jacket. He felt the pulse in his head throb at the sudden change in elevation, and he rummaged through his desk drawer for his Ibuprofen, calling for Carmen to come in. He looked up at her, expecting a missed call slip or a guest, but she wordlessly handed him a fresh cup of coffee. 

“You’re a psychic now?” he asked sarcastically, and she smirked back at him. 

“I saw Benson walk out. When she leaves like that, you end up looking—” She gestured at him. “—like this. I thought I’d get ahead of it.”

He rolled his eyes, and she turned to leave, closing his door on her way out. He was pretty sure Carmen would be his boss someday.

He sipped the coffee and took inventory of his situation. He found that he was a little angry, and embarrassed. But that was normal, right? They were friends, and she should have told him. Just a few days ago, she had showed up at his apartment with a bottle after they found out about the death of a domestic abuse victim, Micha Green. They talked well into the night, and he told her things about his family, his scars, his secrets. He found himself telling her things he had never told anyone else, and when she reached out and took his hand, he found himself clinging to her for dear life, rocked by the guilt and the memories he had been burying for thirty years. They were friends. Apparently that's all they were. But still. She should have told him. 

He knew there was more to it than that, but there was no use acknowledging that now.

He returned his attention to a different SVU case, a case he was actually assigned to and could work on. He told himself to stop thinking about Cassidy, to stop worrying about Olivia. He told himself to do his job. 

When he gave up and left in a huff a few minutes later, he tried not to notice Carmen’s smirk following him out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter occurs during Season 14, Episode 17, Undercover Blue. It also includes references to dialogue from Season 14, Episode 16, Funny Valentine. Did anyone else notice how salty Cassidy and Barba were with each other in this episode? Also how Barba is never invited to squad events at Olivia and Cassidy's apartment, and how Cassidy always seems to get pissy or want to leave when Barba is around, or even when Olivia mentions him? Somebody seems jealous.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olivia gets some unexpected help.

“What’s going on, Detective Benson?”

“Rita,” Olivia said quietly into her phone, turning her back to the tornado of a woman tearing through the apartment. “We have a, uh, situation. At Avery Jordan’s apartment.”

“What’s going on?” the defense attorney repeated around a mouthful of food. She sounded annoyed. Olivia could hear moderate chatter and dishes clinking in the background, and her stomach rumbled at the familiar restaurant noises. She hadn’t eaten since she and Brian had ordered pizza the night before. It was a Saturday morning, and Olivia would normally feel bad for interrupting Rita’s weekend, but she knew what her hourly rates were, and that helped assuage any feelings of guilt.

“Theo’s first supervised custodial visit is today, and Avery is… not cooperating.” That was an understatement. Avery was packing furiously, throwing clothes, photo albums, and infant care supplies into her suitcase. Olivia could never fault her for trying to protect her baby and herself from lifelong contact with her rapist, but professionally, there was little she could do to help, and it was clear that Avery needed someone to be on her side. “My hands are tied. I need you to get down here.” 

“Shit,” Rita replied, then more quietly, “Barba, pay the bill.”

“Barba?” Olivia asked before she could stop herself. She hated the surprised tone of her voice.

“Yeah, we’re at brunch,” Rita replied casually. “Do you need him?”

_Brunch?_ “Uh, no, that’s fine. I don’t think there’s anything he could do.”

“I’m bringing him anyway. We might need him to speak Spanish. I’ll be there in ten.”

Olivia balked. “Uh, okay, that’s not—”

Rita had already hung up. 

Olivia called Cragen again to fill him in on the situation, trying not to think about why Barba and Rita Calhoun would be at brunch. On a Saturday morning. And he paid the bill? 

“Avery,” she said, standing between the young mother and her suitcase, trying to focus her attention on the matter at hand. “Listen—”

“If you’re going to try to stop me, you can leave.” Avery stalked around her. The word _hellbent_ came to mind. 

“I’m not trying to stop you. I’m not legally allowed to help you commit a crime, and refusing to honor court-ordered visitation would be custodial interference, so I’m going to assume that you’re packing for a trip you’re taking after the visit. If I were going to help you pack for that trip, I would remind you to bring birth certificates, social security cards, vaccination records, passports, and insurance information for you and your son. Just in case.”

Avery finally stopped her frenzied packing to look at Olivia. Olivia continued, “I would make sure you didn’t forget medications for you and the baby, passwords to all of your accounts, anything you have in a safe.” Theo started crying in the other room, and Avery’s eyes got misty. The gravity of her situation seemed to hit her all at once, and her shoulders began to slump. Olivia put a hand on each of Avery’s shoulders to steady her. “Avery, it’s okay. I’ll get him. I’ll take care of him. Your lawyer is on her way, and then we’ll sort out the details. For your trip. It’s going to be fine, I promise.” Avery took a shaky breath and nodded. 

Olivia walked into Theo’s nursery, avoiding stepping on hangers strewn across the floor. Drawers were pulled out of the baby’s dresser, and most of the shelves in the room were empty. Olivia crept toward the crib, where Theo’s cries were growing more insistent by the second. She lifted the baby to her chest and bounced, checking to see if his diaper was wet, or if he was too warm. She picked up the pacifier that was attached to his shirt with a clip and popped it into his mouth. Slowly, he quieted in her arms. She heard a knock at the door. 

Avery’s figure appeared suddenly at the door of the nursery, her eyes wide and panicked. “I’ll get it,” Olivia assured her. “I’m sure it’s Calhoun. If it’s anyone else, we’ll handle it.” She bounced the baby with each step as she moved toward the entryway, checking the peephole to confirm who was knocking before she opened the door. She turned the handle, and the door swung open to reveal Rita Calhoun and Barba, as promised. It was a jolt to see them both dressed so casually, both of them wearing jeans and light jackets for the unseasonably warm March morning. Rita didn’t have any makeup on, and her hair was pulled back in a messy bun. Barba was holding a brown paper bag from a popular breakfast restaurant in one of his hands. He looked sheepish. 

Rita blew past Olivia and into the apartment, taking note of the debris caused by Avery’s frenzied packing. Olivia heard her talking to Avery in clipped tones in the bedroom, and she was temporarily relieved that the situation was out of her hands. 

She turned her attention to Barba. “You didn’t have to come,” she said, trying to make her voice sound casual. “You know I speak Spanish.”

“Good to see you too, Liv,” he joked. He looked at her face more closely, and she could feel him noticing her stress. “You couldn’t legally do what Rita is going to ask me to do,” he said quietly. 

“And you can?”

“All I’m going to do is arrange for a plane. I was not involved in this case at the family court level, and I have no official knowledge of any factors that would prevent Ms. Jordan from visiting South America with her son.”

“Ah,” was all Olivia said. She was sure it was more complicated, more gray, than what he was letting on, but she also knew that he would do anything in his power to help keep battered and frightened women and their children safe. 

“Have you eaten?” he asked abruptly. “I brought you a box.” 

She thought about declining, but her stomach growled again. He smirked and walked to the kitchen, looking for available counter space. She followed him, still bouncing little Theo on her chest. “I’m sorry for interrupting your…” She didn’t want to say date. If anything, breakfast was probably a continuation of a date from the night before. Her stomach sank a little at the thought, and she tried to push the image away. “Your meal.” 

“It’s fine,” he said vaguely. “Do you want me to take him?” He gestured at the baby in her arms, and his eyes went soft. She handed Theo off gently, and he took the baby in his arms and held him against his chest, mimicking her bouncing. The child squirmed a little at the changes in temperature and fabric, but he settled quickly, and she moved toward the box he had set out on the counter for her. She picked at the bacon, trying to ignore the flutter in her belly as she watched him murmur softly to the baby out of the corner of her eye. 

"I'm surprised you called Rita," he said after a pause. "I didn't think you trusted defense attorneys."

"Apparently you do," she said before she could stop herself.

He didn't seem to notice her tone. "Rita's one of the good ones. She's still human, anyway."

He was right. Olivia admired Rita's advocacy for Avery, the way she turned to steel when she felt her client being threatened or intimidated. She wanted to ask about him and Rita, but if she was honest with herself, she probably didn’t want to know the specifics. She didn’t really have a right to ask, anyway. She hadn’t told him about Brian, and then when she was backed into a corner, she had addressed the issue in the most cowardly way, using Nick as a human shield to avoid any awkward, _personal_ conversation that might arise. She had tried to compartmentalize, but she knew that her feelings for him had extended past their one-night, one-time thing. She went to bed with him because she was fascinated by him, enthralled by him, she desired him; now, they were friends because she admired him, respected him, trusted him with the things and people who were most important to her. He was unexpectedly warm, protective, fierce and funny in a way that made her stomach flutter. When she imagined herself really _being_ with him, she knew it would be complicated, challenging, all-encompassing. She would have to put it all on the line in a way that she would never have to with Cassidy. She wasn’t ready for him yet. 

That didn’t mean she wanted to see him with somebody else.

But that wasn’t really fair of her, and for all she knew, he and Rita had been going on for years, longer than she’d even known him. He’d told her they went way back, and as much as Calhoun frustrated him, she knew there was respect between them. Maybe even tension, heat. Maybe their courtroom animosity was some kind of weird lawyer foreplay. Maybe she really was just a one-time thing for him, and Rita was the person he thought about when he was alone at night, the way she tried not to think about him. Maybe that part of her relationship with him had been one-sided, all in her head. Maybe all those times she thought about kissing him, he was making plans in his head with someone else. Maybe her guilt over Cassidy and her complete cowardice was misguided. He seemed to be doing just fine.

She heard him laughing softly behind her, and she whipped her head around to look at him. He was smirking, clearly laughing at her, but she found that she couldn’t take him seriously when he was bouncing a baby, dressed like some kind of middle-aged dad at a little league tournament. “What crimes against humanity has that bacon committed, Detective?” She looked down at her hands. Her fingertips were slick with grease, and she had obliterated the strips of bacon into bits. She blushed and met his eyes, realizing belatedly how close he was standing to her.

“Rafael,” Rita called, popping her head into the kitchen from the hallway. She glanced between them. “Come here, I need you. Detective, you stay there. Finish your breakfast.”

“Are you sure I can’t help?” she asked, stepping back against the counter and ignoring the residual heat in her cheeks and the sour feeling in her gut at Rita’s slip, her use of his first name, so casual, and the phrase, _I need you_. 

“I’m sure. Well, no, actually. You can hold the baby, so he doesn’t wake up. Mr. Barba needs to make a phone call.” She looked between them again and then disappeared around the corner. 

Olivia washed her hands quickly and dried them off on a dish towel, then accepted a sleepy Theo from Barba’s arms. His eyes were still soft, focused on the top of the baby’s head, and his hands lingered on hers. “Barba, let’s move,” Rita said insistently from around the corner, and he followed after her. 

She carried the baby with her as she moved around the apartment, double checking that Avery’s diaper bag was well-stocked and tidying up what she could. She tried to stay out of earshot of the bedroom, understanding that she needed to know as little as possible if she was going to keep her promise to Avery. Finally, Rita poked her head out of the bedroom. “We’re almost ready, Detective Benson. Can you get him into his car seat?” Olivia nodded and Rita disappeared back into the bedroom. She bundled the baby in a tiny jacket on the couch next to his diaper bag before strapping him into Avery’s car seat, making cooing noises to soothe him when he squirmed and fussed during the transition. 

As soon as he was buckled in, his mother and the two lawyers emerged from the bedroom. “Detective Benson,” Rita said, her voice all steel and efficiency. “Thank you for calling me. I have counseled my client, and Mr. Barba and I will be transporting her to the precinct, for the custodial visit.” Olivia nodded, but she knew this was all for show, for her benefit, so that she was cleared from the legal ramifications of aiding and abetting Avery's escape. 

“Good luck,” she said to Avery, and the woman squeezed her hand, tears in her eyes as she looked around her apartment for what Olivia knew would be the last time. 

Barba picked up the infant carrier and led the way out the door, with Avery trailing behind him. On her way out the door, Rita stopped. “Do us a favor and wait half an hour or so before you call your Captain. You can lock up when you leave and give the keys to Barba next time you see him, and I’ll take care of the rest.” She grasped Olivia’s shoulder. “Thank you, Detective.” 

“Of course," Olivia said. "Sorry to interrupt your weekend.”

“Honestly, I was grateful. My wife had tickets to some awful student musical, and she and Barba were trying to bully me into going with them. You do not want to hear their drunken duets.”

Olivia opened her mouth and then shut it again, trying to process the implications of Rita's words. Her wife. That sounded vaguely familiar, and she wondered how she had forgotten. Barba might have even mentioned something about Rita making the transition to criminal defense to help pay for her wife's medical bills. Olivia was usually good at reading these situations, understanding relationships, but she had missed all the clues. Clearly the Barba of it all had thrown her off her game. Rita gave her a knowing look and moved toward the door. “That’s what I thought. Thirty minutes, Detective,” she called after her, and then she was gone. 

Olivia did what she asked, hoping to ensure that Avery had the best possible shot at freedom, of a life lived without looking over her shoulder. She remembered that Avery said on the witness stand that she and her son were fighters, survivors, and Olivia knew that was true. She looked around the wreckage of their old life and hoped that whatever was waiting for them, wherever they were going, they would find peace. 

For her own reasons, she was grateful for the break. She had a lot to think about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place around the tail end of Season 14, Episode 18, Legitimate Rape. GOD that episode pissed me off for like fifty different reasons. Anyway, someone mentioned in a comment in my last chapter that they were interested in seeing Olivia pine, so this is my take on that. Also, Rita Calhoun is a happy, rich lesbian.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barba has a migraine.

He heard his door shut from where he sat on the edge of his desk, and it echoed in the chambers of his mind like a slam. He felt his pulse pound in his forehead, in his ears, and it was all he could do to turn around and greet his visitor. He had a migraine. He’d _had_ a migraine for what felt like weeks, but on the way back to his office from court that morning, he had been suddenly overwhelmed by a searing pain behind his eyes, in his neck, in his forehead and temples. He’d taken Ibuprofen, then Excedrin, then he’d given up and poured himself a scotch.

Olivia Benson stood in his doorway, and his inflamed brain wondered bitterly what fresh misery SVU would heap upon him tonight. It had been a tough few weeks, weeks of uncooperative witnesses and stonewalling university officials and disgusting, overconfident, privileged predators, ones he recognized too well from his Harvard days and hated even more now that he’d read a few thousand victim impact statements. A victim whose rape he was prosecuting had died by suicide, and he’d barely snatched her case out of the jaws of defeat at the last second. He was still trying to navigate the new rules and nuances of his friendship (and only friendship) with Olivia-with-a-boyfriend, and part of that included allowing himself to be set up on frustrating dates with strangers he didn’t have enough patience for or interest in. He was terrible at casual dating, although it could also be argued that casual dating was always terrible. 

Of course none of this was her fault, and it would all have to happen eventually. But he was tired of feeling like all he ever got was bad news. He sipped his scotch. 

“Are you okay?” Olivia asked, and he realized he’d never actually greeted her, or even acknowledged her, just stared at her dumbly through slitted eyes from across the room. He searched for a quip, a barb, but came up empty. “Barba,” she said, like a nervous question, and he hated the concern in her voice, hated how badly he wanted to sink into her attention and compassion like a warm bath. Her eyes were doing that sweet, careful thing she did with broken people, and his shoulders slumped a little under her gaze.

“I’m fine,” he bit out, but he pinched the bridge of his nose anyway, because maybe that would dull the thud, the ache, the raging ocean behind his eyes. 

“You don’t look fine,” she said cautiously, almost guarding herself, and he felt guilty for snapping. She wasn’t to blame for the tempest in his mind. She only ever wanted to help.

“Is it the tie or the pocket square?” he joked, involuntarily turning away and squeezing his eyes shut tight against the assaulting daylight. 

She paused a beat, and he thought maybe she would leave, although that wasn't like her. Then he heard her moving near him, closer, smelled her shampoo mingling with the scent of his scotch. He expected her to grab his hand, maybe, to comfort him with her fingers intertwined with his and her thumb rubbing patterns over his skin, like she sometimes did when they were alone, like he loved. But her hands were on his shoulders instead, pulling his jacket down, and he opened his eyes, feeling a sharp tingle behind his eyebrows at the intrusion of the light. 

He looked at her with his brow furrowed, just as much in pain as confusion, but she ignored him. She pulled the suit jacket down his shoulders and off his arms, then laid it gently over the back of his desk chair. She started working on the buttons on his vest and he was sure he should stop her, but he honestly had no idea where she was going with this and all his words had been swept away with the tide, so he closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. She pulled off the vest in the same way she removed his jacket, and her fingers were so gentle, soothing, almost dancing across his shoulders and down his arms. She laid the vest over his jacket and moved to loosen his suspenders, and his mouth was thick, and his tongue was made of concrete, but he finally found one word, a question, “Liv?” 

She made soothing shh noises and slipped his suspenders off his shoulders. “You’re carrying too much tension there, it’s making your headache worse.” 

He didn’t tell her he had a headache. He supposed she was a trained detective. 

She took his hand (the way she sometimes did, the way he loved) and guided him, slow and quiet, to the couch. He sat down gingerly in the middle of the sofa and tried to ignore the waves slamming against his skull, protesting against the change in elevation and blood pressure. He decided he didn’t want to know what she was doing, didn’t want it to stop, and he closed his eyes. All his thoughts felt weighted down with anchors, sinking to the bottom of a black abyss. 

She moved first to his windows and closed his blinds, gently, but he could hear the friction zip against the cord. She padded across the carpet and closed and locked his office door, and he found himself enveloped in blessed darkness, sheltered, relieved. He realized she must have turned the lights off. 

Her scent was upon him again, then her hands, cool and soft. She slipped off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, and he wanted to groan but he wasn’t sure whether it was in pleasure or pain anymore. There was still so much pain in his neck, behind his eyes, at the bridge of his nose. She pulled his shirt off, and he let her. He recognized his vulnerability in this position and found that he didn’t care. 

She perched on her knees next to him on the couch, and her hands moved to his shoulders, her fingers slipping underneath the fabric of his plain white undershirt. She applied gentle pressure at first, her fingers searching out his muscles and exploring them, assessing them. She found a source of tension just above the tip of his right shoulder blade and her thumb picked up the pressure, pressing it down, out, away. He really did groan this time and she only pressed harder, her hands the softest instruments of agony he’d ever known. After she was satisfied with his back, her hands moved up, to the back of his neck. She rubbed tiny, stiff circles from the base of his skull to the top of his spine, diffusing the tension and pulling little groans out of his throat. 

She worked on him for a long time, on his neck and shoulders, behind his ears, up to his temples, down to his shoulders. Her hands moved under his thin undershirt, across the planes of his back, crept down his spine and checked for tight muscles and tough knots. Finally, her expert fingers released him, and she smoothed her palms over his back and shoulders, soothing him, cooling him down, before finally she stood up and walked across the room. He missed her touch instantly, and he wasn’t sure whether it was because her hands had relieved his pain, or because he missed her presence, her aura pressing against his and making him feel less alone.

While she got a glass from his counter and filled it with water, he experimentally rolled his neck, surprised and relieved to feel that he could tip his head all the way back without a searing pain temporarily blinding him. His migraine was still a dull thud, but the agony had abated to a more sleepy soreness. She handed him the glass and commanded, softly, “Drink.” 

He sipped at the water gratefully, and she continued, “I don’t know what you were thinking, drinking scotch. You’re probably already dehydrated.” He wanted to roll his eyes and make a scandalous innuendo about how he was a big boy, but his eyes were too sore for rolling, and Olivia Benson was a miracle.

When he was finished, she took the glass from his hand and sat it gently on a side table. She sat at the end of the couch and removed her blazer, exposing her collarbone and the skin of her neck to him. She folded her jacket into a square on her lap. “Come here,” she said softly, and he met her eyes, still puzzled. “You need to rest,” she reminded him, “or it’s just going to get worse. I’ll wake you up in 30 minutes.”

“You don’t have to stay for that,” he hazarded, and she rolled her eyes. 

“I’m going to walk out of here, and you’re going to get out your phone or a case file and make yourself sick. Take a damn nap, Barba.”

He was still reluctant despite the edge in her voice, and she patted the blazer again, soft. He hesitated for a breath, but it was dark, and he was tired, and her lap looked so painfully inviting. He gave in and rested his head on her thighs, facing away from her body, and adjusted his own body to fill the length of the couch. There was a voice in his head that sounded something like reason, telling him that this was inappropriate, that he didn’t need help, that he’d had worse. But her nails were scratching light patterns into his hair, and her other hand was stroking his bicep, soft, oval patterns, and he thought that she was his friend, and she was worried about him, and he couldn’t possibly deny himself this comfort, however inappropriate, however small. His breathing matched the pace of her fingers against his arm, and he drifted off, just for a moment, under her touch. 

When he woke up from a sleep that was too deep to be only thirty minutes, her hands had stilled. He turned over from his side to his back to see that her head was tipped back and her eyes were closed. He reached up and squeezed one of her hands lightly, and her eyes opened to meet his. 

“Hey,” she said softly, in a velvet whisper, likely for his benefit. “I was just resting my eyes. How are you feeling?”

He sat up next to her and rolled his head, then his shoulders. He was still a little stiff, a little sore in some places from her persistent, kneading fingers and his tired bones, but the waves in his brain had receded. The ocean had quieted. He was thirsty, and as soon as he thought it, she was standing up with his glass in her hand to get him more water. 

He thought that love might not be a strong enough word for what he felt for her then, his best friend, his partner. She could sense his emotions across a crowded courtroom from only a look in his eye, a nod of his head, and she could read his thoughts when the angry ocean in his brain was too loud for him to hear them. She was a force of nature, the only person he really ever needed in his corner. There would probably always be a part of him that wondered what it would be like to be with her, but God, it was so good to be her friend, to be loved by her in whatever way she could offer it to him. It was enough.

He drank the second glass of water and thought that he could probably define himself as feeling like a human again. “Thank you,” he started, and she waved him off again. She sat next to him and ran her hand through his hair once more, caressing his back. She kissed his cheek, and he tried not to shiver. 

“A little better?” she asked, and he nodded. 

“Okay,” she said gently, right near his ear. She paused. "It's been a tough few weeks." 

"Yeah," he said, amazed at how she could boil down a mountain of problems into a few small words. It had been a tough few weeks. But they were still here, still friends, still fighting.

“Was there a reason for your visit?” he asked, realizing that she had been in his office for over an hour and he hadn’t asked. They hadn’t gotten any work done. There was still so much work to be done.

“I wanted to see how the arraignment went,” she said nonchalantly. “I would have been there, but I went to the vigil at TSU to check on Renee Clark.” His brow furrowed, remembering the complicated case still ahead of them. Jesus, he hoped those frat boys would take a plea. She touched his arm, grounding him. “Don’t worry about that now. I texted Carmen that you were sick and asked her to hold your calls. I’ll take you home when you’re ready.” 

He wondered what she had told Carmen they were doing, whether anyone else knew they were alone in his office in the dark, only partially dressed. His hair was messy from laying his head in her lap and he thought that he’d been there before, dreamed about being there again, but despite its complete lack of sexual energy, this encounter felt strangely more intimate. 

He dressed quietly and loaded up his paperwork to take home with him, ignoring her disapproving glance. She cleaned up the glasses and opened the blinds, letting his eyes adjust to the light slowly, rather than flooding his delicate senses all at once. She asked if he was ready to go, and he knew it would hurt to be exposed to the sounds and lights of the city, but she grabbed his hand and held it in her own, intertwining their fingers and rubbing his skin with her thumb, the way she sometimes did, the way he loved, and he felt like even if it would hurt, it was worth it to have enough light to see the way she looked at him, no judgment, all love. She dropped his hand and reached for the small of his back, and they walked out together into the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place immediately after Season 14, Episode 20, Girl Dishonored. I just really wanted to write about Barba getting a massage so this is pure self-indulgence.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olivia makes changes.
> 
> I bumped the rating for this one because I can't help myself.

Olivia needed to make a big change. 

At first, she tried little changes. Switching to soy in her morning coffee order. Going to yoga before work instead of after dinner. Suggesting that she and Brian visit the Plein Air Painters exhibit at the Whitney, instead of sitting on her couch eating takeout or walking aimlessly around the park, searching in vain for something to talk about that wouldn’t start an argument or a cold war or just make her feel listless. Bored. All they really had in common was their fucked-up history, their exhausting jobs, and bringing up either of those topics just reminded them that there was nothing else to talk about anymore. She’d thought idly about cutting her hair. She knew that wasn’t a good sign.

Little changes didn’t work. She felt like she was wilting, decaying. She needed a big change. Bigger than coffee, bigger than yoga, bigger than the museum. She didn’t like change, wasn’t good at it, but she recognized the necessity for change when it was staring her in the face. 

Well. Really, the necessity leered at her from her phone’s activity log, showing her three times in a row that she’d ignored Brian’s calls. She stumbled across the necessity glancing disapprovingly at her from her reflection in the mirrored wall behind the bar, when she caught herself laughing, relieved, open and at ease with her squad in a way that she never felt with Brian. The necessity for change sat beside her and whispered reprimands in her ear when she caught herself biting her lip against a feeling she refused to call desire that was blooming in her chest, watching her terribly grumpy, bossy, painfully, stupidly sexy ADA walk around his office in fucking suspenders, making clipped, sarcastic digs at everyone and giving her his “goddammit Olivia” eyes just before he gave in and did whatever she asked him to do. The necessity for change had made itself known, and she was tired of pretending it wasn’t there. 

Barba noticed the little changes. He made gentle fun of her for the soy, and blushed and looked away when she brought up being sore from morning yoga, which she wouldn’t admit she’d done on purpose, to get a rise out of him, but she had. He was the one who’d first mentioned the exhibit to her, the person she’d first thought of when she saw the ad for the exhibit in the paper and invited Brian. He’d visited the museum with a date, he said entirely too casually, and she thought maybe it was the same date whose yacht he’d been on when Amanda asked her to call him the Sunday morning they found William Lewis in the park. 

_Maybe not the same date,_ she thought. _Maybe he has lots of different dates, with different people, on yachts and in museums and in his bed late at night._ She had no way to know. They didn’t ever talk about dating. It was probably the only thing they didn’t feel steady enough to talk about, and it made her feel cowardly, but a little relieved. They’d talked about their desire once, and she knew it was mutual, unavoidable, and hopeless. She dealt with it by refusing to name it, refusing to acknowledge it when the pilot light of wanting him flickered on inside her belly. She wondered which she would prefer, Barba having one recurring partner or several, then she reprimanded herself for having a preference in the first place. It wasn’t fair to have a preference. He should do what made him happy. She had Brian for that. Even though Brian didn’t go to museums, and they didn’t have time for dates.

That wasn’t really fair either, or true. She didn’t make time for dates with Brian. She used the time instead for nights at Forlini’s with Barba, mostly, or Nick, or sometimes Munch when he wasn’t otherwise occupied. She told herself that she needed those nights. They made her feel human, like more than a badge. They just made her _feel_ , again. On nights when she had gone numb, when she thought her heart had burned itself out, crumbled, turned to ash in her chest, maybe even blown away for good. A small voice in her head told her that she should be able to _feel_ something when she was with Brian, but she’d tried that. It didn’t work. She knew that was a problem, _the_ problem. Maybe it was her fault. Still. It was what needed to change. 

She voiced the issue of Brian, of change, once, in the stunted and brief way she talked about her own feelings, with Barba on the night they closed Gabby Shaw’s case. It was as close to talking about it as they ever got, because they had the good sense to get a little drunk first. 

She and Barba were each four drinks in. They’d both peeled off their jackets, and he was disheveled, his tie loose around his collar, his sleeves rolled up, exposing surprisingly strong, veiny forearms and a tiny bit of chest hair. She wouldn’t let herself give a name to the feeling his appearance like this gave her, the bloom in her chest, the buzzing in her head, the aching in her fingers from wanting to touch. She wouldn’t name the desire, but that’s what they were both trying not to feel that night. They’d won the trial, and he was brilliant, and that was part of it.

They were out of words to distract themselves. He didn’t try to fill the silence when he was with her, and she liked that. He just sipped his drink, shrugged, bumped her arm with his own and leaned against her, just there, shoulder to shoulder, comrades, commiserating, friends. 

“I think I need to make a change,” she said, and he turned his head to her, raised his eyebrows.

“More yoga?” he asked, smirking, probably flirting a little.

“No,” she said. “I think I need to make a really big change. A permanent change. With Brian.”

His gaze flickered up from where it was resting on her mouth to her eyes, reading her mood, sensing her thoughts, his jaw working along with his mind. When he opened his mouth, he was tight-lipped, serious. “You okay?”

She hesitated, suddenly losing the words that had welled up in her throat. Words about dissatisfaction, loneliness, abnegation, desire. She gave in for just a moment and took his free hand, laced his fingers loosely through her own, ran her thumb along the tight skin between his thumb and forefinger, down into his palm, where she could feel the lines of his hands converging on his skin. “Yeah,” she said after a beat. “I just don’t think I feel what I’m supposed to feel. It’s not what it should be.”

“Few things are,” he said temperately, shaking his head, hedging.

“Some things are.” She looked in his eyes, challenging him. 

“Yeah.”

Maybe Cragen was right, and she really did need to take some time to cool off, to think about this mess and not think about Lewis. She’d been on edge since Amanda called her into the precinct on their day off to piece together what exact brand of sociopath she had encountered in the park. William Lewis had burned his roommate at the halfway house, terrorized two tourists, then assaulted, mutilated, and tortured Alice Parker, leading to her death, and he’d gotten off with a mistrial. Released on bail. With no testimony from a complainant and the contaminated DNA, the odds weren’t good for the retrial, even with Barba prosecuting. Cases like this, people like Lewis, made her feel ineffectual, defeated, disgusted, stuck.

All of these thoughts had plagued her on her walk home from the precinct for her two-day banishment. She was tired of thinking about Brian, about Barba, about desire, about how sometimes her whole career was really just a shout in the void. She really did need a break. She was distracted, distraught. She felt an overwhelming exhaustion, a simmering anger. And maybe that’s why she didn’t notice him. Not until a gun in her face brought her out of her reverie. 

The next four days were hell, and then they were over. She tried not to think about it. The memories and associated feelings would come to her mind unbidden as a matter of course, so there was no reason to conjure them up on her own. 

She found herself making changes in the aftermath, but not the ones she’d intended to make. She started therapy. She cut her hair. She moved in with Brian. He needed a way to assuage his guilt over not noticing she was missing, and she needed someone to goddamn notice she was missing, someone to remind her that she was safe now when she woke up in the middle of the night, someone who wouldn’t notice when she shut her brain down. She remembered why she’d wanted to leave him, words like dissatisfaction, loneliness, abnegation, and desire. She found they didn’t mean anything to her now. They didn’t mean anything to her for a long time.

She healed, slowly. She moved on in all the ways that she could. She rewarded herself for healthy coping mechanisms and forgave herself for unhealthy ones. There were things she once enjoyed that she had no interest in now, and there were new mundane tasks that made her miserable. She hated putting her key in the door when she got home. She refused to touch the duct tape when she and Brian were moving. She had a hard time being touched at first, and her libido was gone. It was normal, and understandable, and temporary, her therapist said, but she didn’t care. Didn’t want to think about it. She’d let it happen on its own. 

The first time she felt desire after she was beginning to think she would never feel it again, she was with Barba. It took her by surprise. She felt safe, connected, protective of him, as she sat on his couch consoling him after her investigation into Alex Muñoz blew up his whole world. He was letting her take care of him, not trying to manage her emotions, and maybe that's why she finally felt comfortable enough to recognize the pilot light in her belly once again. He looked forlorn, weathered, but there was something else. She recognized his loneliness, his disappointment, his abnegation. She recognized, and was surprised by, her own familiar desire.

She let herself feel it. She let herself name it. Then she let herself act on it, let her body get swept away by strong arms and a possessive mouth and a voice that she loved. She let herself enjoy it, cherish it, revel in the rightness of their connection. She caressed his hair, kissed his face, and finally crawled into his lap, feeling his hands rove her back, grab her waist, comb through her hair. He tasted like liquor and something else, something strong and sweet. The desire that had flickered in her belly kept spreading, kept lighting up her entire body, burned her up from the inside out. By the time he stopped her, to make sure it was what she wanted, she was too far gone. She was in the middle of a miracle.

She took the lead. She pulled off her shirt, then his, allowing her hands to roam, to touch, the way they always wanted to do, the way she never let them. Then his mouth found her breast and he sucked, nipped, explored, lavished. Coherent thoughts escaped her. She became all touch, all tongue, all need. She reached down and unzipped his pants and was delighted when he swore against her chest, bucking involuntarily against the brush of her fingers. He felt good in her hands, on her tongue, against her chest. He let her have her way until they were both ragged, panting, driven only by need. He laid her back against the couch and undressed her, made sure she was ready for him with skillful fingers and whispered adoration, then he slipped inside. She felt full, connected, powerful. He groaned and buried his face in her hair, whispered about how beautiful she was, how good she felt, and she let herself believe him. He pulled back to meet her eyes, to kiss her lips, to ask if she was still okay, and she was. They moved together, slow and deliberate at first, but full of powerful intention, building momentum, the way they did in a fight, but this was even more intense, more satisfying, and she arched her back, tilted her hips to meet him, to clash and connect, racing frantically toward each other until finally, finally, the only two people in the world, they shuddered, cried out, and broke apart. 

It was so much better, fuller, deeper than she remembered. She caught her breath, felt him slow his movement against her. She assessed herself, took inventory of her feelings, the way she learned in therapy. She found that she wanted to do it again. She wanted pizza, and she wanted him. They did it again. And again.

The next morning, she didn’t let herself feel guilty. She probably should have, and she would have any other time, with anyone else. It wasn’t like her to do this, but it was the most herself she’d felt in a while. She told herself it would only happen once, but it had needed to happen, and it needed to happen with him, her best friend, the only person who really saw her and knew her and needed her back. She wouldn't let herself feel bad about something that felt so right, so necessary. For both of them. They both needed the connection, the recognition, the relief.

The desire kept coming. She felt it when he took on sexist military officers, when he threatened a gang leader who had made some violent insinuations about her, when he called in federal favors to save one girl, just one, because it was the right thing to do. She felt it in quieter moments, in her office, when he bossed her around a little, when he let her boss him back. Even when he yelled at her, questioned her judgment, his own judgment when it came to her, she desired him. He desired her too. That was probably the issue. They fought, and they drank, and she held his hand, and they wanted each other. 

The desire brought back the discontent, the loneliness, the necessity for change peeking at her from unexpected places. She felt a little grateful for it, if she was honest. That she felt safe enough, whole enough, secure enough that she recognized when she needed to move on. She took her time with it. She talked to her therapist about it. She gave it a fair shake. She wanted to be sure that it was the right thing, the best thing for her and for Brian, whom she loved, but whom she knew she could never fall in love with. In the end, they both knew it was time. She made the change.

She moved on. She brightened, she bloomed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features introspection and the decision-making process (so lots of exposition, I'm sorry) of Olivia from Season 14, Episode 24, Her Negotiation, to Season 15, Episode 19, Downloaded Child. It's about ten months' worth of uncertainty, trauma, and recovery that needed to be addressed, and now we can get into the really fun stuff.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barba gets a text.

Rafael Barba tapped his fingers against his knee and tucked himself between the seat and the door of the taxi, pressing his forehead against the window and letting his eyes skip along the darkened Manhattan streets, nervously flitting around but settling on nothing. He had a sudden urge to chew on his thumbnail, a habit he’d hated as a child and had managed to kick before he started law school. When he stepped inside the cab, he’d ignored a bad joke from the driver about it being "booty call hours," but he supposed he was technically right. It was just after midnight, and the streets were relatively clear. He'd made good time to get to her.

When his phone went off on his bedside table half an hour earlier, his heart had skipped a beat in his chest. He recognized Olivia’s personal ringtone, a grating little chirp, snapping him out of his book. She hadn’t called in over a week.

Despite everything they’d gone through to make sure he never saw the light of day, Olivia had once again been hunted by William Lewis. Blackmailed. Humiliated. Tormented. Taken. Assaulted, again, and almost killed. Barba hadn’t slept or eaten the entire time Lewis was out. Instead, he’d stalked around his office, drank too much coffee, glued himself to the television, begged his mind to stop wandering to those evidence photos of Olivia’s scars, begged God not to let that happen to her again. When she was finally home, finally safe, he thought maybe he could exhale. Then he found out she was about to be railroaded by his colleagues at the Brooklyn DA’s office, and he hit the roof. After forcibly removing Barba from Strauss’s office, McCoy told him he understood the instinct, the loyalty, but that they both knew what it looked like. He was instructed to stay away from Olivia’s case, and Olivia’s precinct, until everyone in the DA’s office had time to forget his “embarrassing emotional tirade.” Fly under the radar, McCoy said. Unless he wanted to be called up as a witness against her in Strauss’s perjury case and answer questions he didn't want to answer, maybe ruin both their careers. 

He’d stayed away, waited for her to call, wondered if he was old enough to have a heart attack. He’d learned today from Rita Calhoun that she wasn’t being indicted, that she finally really was safe. He probably could have heard the good news sooner, but he’d been ducking calls and curious looks from colleagues who’d heard about his outburst and were probably wondering if he was about to crack. He felt like he just might. So he went home, poured a drink, read a book about colonialism and poverty in rural India. Pretended he wasn’t waiting for her to call. 

She’d sent him a text, a single line. “Are you awake?”

He swallowed the fear and urgency that he didn’t realize had crept up his throat and responded, a simple, “Yes.” He wondered why she hadn’t called. She always called, even when it was late, even when she knew he was busy.

His phone chirped again, the familiar Olivia tone. “Come over?”

That was new, and it made him nervous. They usually met in his office or hers, at the bar, at the coffee cart halfway between their offices. He’d never even been to her new apartment, the one she’d shared with Cassidy up until the end of last month. He thought the boundary they’d silently agreed to set, to stay away from each other’s beds, had been an important one. It helped them stay just on the right side of too close, too much, too together. She sent him another text, her address, and he sat up, shutting his eyes against the protests of his weary muscles. “Give me half an hour,” he typed out, and he got out of his bed in search of something to wear. 

He wasn’t sure what he’d find when he got to her apartment, and the newness, the uncertainty, rattled him a little more than he expected. When she told him she wasn’t with Cassidy anymore, weeks ago, nonchalantly, right before a meeting so he didn’t have time to ask questions, he told himself it wouldn’t change anything. That they shouldn’t let it change anything. Some people in both of their offices might argue that they were too close as it was, and especially since she’d become acting squad commander, they had to present themselves as consummate professionals if they wanted to keep working together. It went without saying that working together wasn’t something either of them was willing to sacrifice. 

Mostly because they’d gotten so fucking good at it. He’d never trusted a team of detectives like he trusted hers, and he couldn’t imagine how it would feel to go back to playing the role of the arrogant, all-business, unemotional ADA he’d needed to be to get things done in Brooklyn. They were easily the best SVU squad in the city, and he knew that their dynamic was a part of that. On their best days, he felt like they could read each other’s minds, see the trap embedded in a line of questioning before anyone else caught on. They knew exactly what they needed from each other, and they found a way to get it, to make the case, get the warrant, bump the charges. 

He remembered that things between them had been rocky at first, and they still bickered and argued more days than not, but they’d pushed through the stubbornness, the friction, even the sexual tension between them that sometimes made everything feel too heated, too high-stakes. There were days in the first few months when he hated that he could look at her and remember what her lips tasted like, how she felt wrapped around him, how pretty she looked when she came. It made it hard to let her down, to give her bad news, to save his own skin. But after almost two years of working together, they found ways to use it to their advantage, and it made them so much better, a better team and better friends. They walked a tightrope, always one toe over the line, but so what? They were happy, synchronized, effective. 

But here she was, asking him, “Come over?” Crossing that boundary, inviting trouble. And he knew instantly that he could never say no. He knew she wouldn’t ask if she didn’t need him. And if he was honest with himself, he needed to see her too, to lay his hands on her, to know that she was really all right after everything that had happened. She was his best friend, and she’d been through hell, and he needed to be there for her. Wherever she needed him. Boundaries be damned.

So here he was, climbing out of his taxi into the crisp, dark April air, walking up to her building in the middle of the night, stepping inside like he’d been there a thousand times. He made it to her door, still jittery, and knocked softly. He heard her walk up to the entryway, examine him through the peephole, undo the chain, turn the lock. Finally, she opened the door and pulled him inside. 

He looked her over while she redid the lock, the chain, checked the lock again, took a steadying breath, her hand still wrapped around his wrist. She was dressed more casually than he thought he’d ever seen her, unless you counted the times he’d seen her naked or walking around in a towel. She was wearing jogging shorts with pink piping down the sides and a plain gray tank top cut low and loose around her ribs. Her hair was messy around her shoulders, and her face was bare. She was dressed for bed, he realized. She looked tired, unsettled, but still blessedly whole. 

He let his eyes wander briefly around her new apartment. It was a pretty place, stylish, airy, a little bigger than her old one. There were gaps on her shelves, he assumed from where Cassidy’s things had once been. She probably hadn’t made the time to rearrange after she found herself living alone. He resisted the urge to peruse her book collection and turned to face her again. She dropped his wrist and stepped into her living room. As with all things, he followed her lead. 

“Thanks for coming. Do you want a drink?” she asked. Her voice was husky, low, quiet. He realized she’d been crying.

“Do you?” he asked. 

She topped off her glass of wine and passed it over to him, and he sipped. She sat down on the couch and curled up with her feet under her, and he sat next to her, at the very edge of the sofa, still in view of the door. 

“Thank you for sending Rita to represent me. I tried to pay her, but—” 

“Don’t worry about it, Liv. She owed me.” He’d called Rita as soon as he learned from Declan Murphy that Olivia was meeting with IAB. He’d heard enough horror stories from Olivia and Amaro to know not to ever trust Ed Tucker, and Rita was the only defense attorney he believed would fight for Olivia the way he would have. 

“I didn’t realize I’d need an attorney,” Olivia said, and she took a big gulp of wine. She looked almost boneless, defeated. 

“You shouldn’t have. Strauss is a jackass and I’m going to get him disbarred,” he murmured, and she breathed a laugh through her nose and leaned into him.

"I missed you," she whispered.

He put his arm around her shoulders, and she settled her head against his chest. “You okay?” he asked her quietly, tenderly, and she nodded against him. 

“I’m taking the rest of the week off. They’re leaving Declan in charge of the squad for now, so there’s not as much pressure. I’ve been going to therapy every day, and that’s helping. I just—” She broke off, swallowed, took a few measured breaths. After a quiet moment, she continued, “I didn’t want to be alone.”

He held her tighter against him, pulled his free arm across his body to stroke her hair, her cheek. He kissed the top of her head. “You’re not.” 

“I was going to call you, but Rita said you yelled at Strauss and got on the DA’s bad side, and I should wait.”

“I live on the DA’s bad side. You could have called.” He kissed her hair again. “I’m here now.”

They sat like that for a long time, his arms wrapped around her body and her head on his chest. She’d curled one arm around his waist and was fiddling idly with the hem of his sweatshirt while he played with her hair and peppered kisses at the top of her head. He could feel her breathing against him, could smell her familiar shampoo, and he felt his racing mind quiet for the first time in days. After a while her hand stilled, her breathing slowed, and he realized she was asleep. 

“Liv,” he whispered quietly against her hair. She stirred, inhaled deeply, and looked up at him, bleary-eyed. “Do you want to go to bed?”

She sighed and burrowed down back into his shoulder. She mumbled something into his chest. He jostled her a little, and he was sure he heard her swearing at him through his shirt. He laughed, and she hoisted herself up off the couch, then gave him both her hands and pulled him up onto his feet.

“Can you stay?” she asked quietly, uncertainly. 

They both knew it would be crossing a line. A big one. But he would cross any line for her. “Of course,” he said, rubbing her hands with his thumbs. 

He followed her through her dark living room down a hallway, past a tidy kitchen, a couple of closed doors, and into her bedroom at the end of the hall. It was a tidy room, with pretty white furniture and lavender and gold accents. Her bed looked exactly like he remembered, and the recollection caused heat to pool low in his belly, but he ignored it, understanding that it wasn't what tonight was about. There was a spot against the wall with noticeable indentations in the carpet, and he realized they must have come from some of Cassidy’s furniture, now gone from her apartment. He knew which side of the bed belonged to her because one of the bedside tables had an alarm clock, a bottle of lotion, a pair of reading glasses, and a book on the surface, and the other was starkly empty. 

“Is it too weird?” she asked him suddenly, and he turned to look at her where she lay, tucked under the blankets and sitting up against the headboard. He realized she’d been seeing her room through his eyes, noticing the little ghosts of Cassidy in the same way that he had, and he felt guilty for making her insecure when she was already so tired and raw.

“Is it weird for you?” he countered.

“Not really,” she said. “We weren’t seeing much of each other anyway, and you know… what we were like. He offered to come back after everything with Lewis, but neither of us really wanted that. I needed some time to myself.”

“And now?” he asked. 

“Now I want you to take your pants off and get in my bed.” 

He rolled his eyes and smirked, but he did as she asked, stripping down to just his boxers and sliding in right beside her under the sheets. She turned off her lamp and turned toward him, curling into him in the same way she had on the couch. She draped a leg over him possessively, and he tried not to groan. Then she reached up and kissed him, open-mouthed, earnest and sweet, and he really did groan, then swear. She laughed.

“We’re going to get ourselves fired, aren’t we?” he asked.

She laughed again. “Maybe, eventually. Probably.”

“I think it might be worth it.”

She kissed him again, and he let himself sink into it, deepen it, savor it. She kissed him like she was cherishing him, memorizing him, like she was kissing him for the first time and she thought she might never get to kiss him again. “I think so too,” she said when they broke apart. “But I don’t think we have to decide right now.”

He tucked her head under his chin and wrapped both arms around her, holding her close against his heart. He’d already decided, right then. But she could have all the time she needed.

Slowly, their breathing mingled and became one, and they drifted off to sound sleep for the first time in days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place after Season 15, Episode 21, Post-Mortem Blues. I was so upset that Barba wasn't in Beast's Obsession or Post-Mortem Blues because you know our boy was climbing the walls. In "A One-Time Thing," this chapter chronologically falls between chapters 2 and 3.
> 
> Did any important action happen in this chapter? No. Did I think it was critically necessary to write and share 1000 words of Barson cuddling anyway? *Pam Beesley gif* YUP.


	7. Chapter 7

It was a rare golden summer in Olivia Benson’s world. Usually summers in Manhattan were too hot, tempers were too high, but this summer was blissfully different. She had a son, a beautiful, sweet little creature who loved her and needed her and made the word _family_ sound more like the word _joy_ instead of the word _shame_ or _guilt_ or _loneliness_. She loved watching him discover the little miracles of the world, delighted in finding new favorite things for him every day. The shadow of his mother’s brutal death still lingered in her memory, but she saw traces of Ellie in her son’s smiling eyes, and it made her fight harder, dig deeper, do whatever it would take to keep her son safe, to give him everything he deserved and everything Ellie should have had. Her hope for his future spilled over into hope for her own, and she felt everything around her become fresh with possibility and promise. 

What was left of her squad was doing well under her command. She was more confident this time around, more willing to trust her detectives and follow her own internal compass. Their stats were solid, their rapport was good, and everyone she worked with took her new responsibilities as a mother just as seriously as she did. They accommodated her, covered for her, lifted her up on the hard, tired days that often followed sleepless nights with a new baby. She was still short-staffed. Deputy Chief Dodds was eternally breathing down her neck, and it was taking longer than she wanted to get Nick back from traffic patrol after his stint in anger management, but Fin was as solid as always, and she and Amanda were learning to trust each other again. Her life felt full of good things.

Her relationship with Barba had always been a good thing, a bright spot in her days. Even when they were fighting, when they were tired and frustrated and ignoring their feelings, he was her best friend. He was there for her, in court and in the bar and in her corner, always. But this golden summer had tinged their relationship golden, too, and it had evolved into something sacred to her. Now he was there for her in shorts and a bright short-sleeved button-up, holding her hand in the park on a Saturday morning, pushing Noah in his stroller down the sidewalk and stealing kisses from her every time she looked his way. He was in her kitchen making breakfast in his boxers, singing along to Latin American Pandora and calling her _querida._ He was between her legs, paying careful attention to her sighs and moans and shivers, learning her, reading her, satisfying and igniting her all at once. 

It was beginning to be a problem, the way her heart swelled when she saw him, the way her eyes softened and her breath hitched and her fingers itched to find his. They’d gotten lucky for the first few months. Their cases were relatively low profile, and her squad was small, just her and Rollins and Fin for the summer. They paid special attention to sex workers who came through their precinct, looking for trafficked women and leads on any possible connections to Ellie Porter, but for SVU, it was quiet. Relatively direct. They didn’t talk about what they weren’t talking about, the fact that they had yet to disclose their relationship to the NYPD and the DA’s office. It felt impossible, and really there was no need—nothing had changed, no one had noticed, nothing was wrong. 

Until one morning when not enough coffee in the world could wake her up, and they needed a warrant. “I’ll call Barba,” Olivia said to Rollins and Fin before pulling her cell phone out and calling the most recent number in her call history. He’d gotten distracted kissing her goodbye and left a file on her counter that morning, something she knew he needed for court that afternoon. She’d called him before heading into her own office to see when he needed it, and if she could wait until lunch to drop it off. Olivia walked into her office and sat down at her desk, her feet and back rejoicing at the opportunity to rest, and listened to the phone ring, waiting for his voice on the other line. 

“Lunch time already?” he joked by way of answering, and she smiled. 

“Do you ever stop thinking about food?” she asked. 

“Sometimes I think about other things,” he replied slyly, darkly. 

“Shame on you, Counselor,” she replied, smiling into her phone.

“What?” he asked innocently. “I was talking about coffee.”

She looked down at her casefile while she told him what grounds she had for the warrant and what exactly she needed from him, making sure her information was accurate and that there would be no surprises. He promised to bring her the warrant by their lunch date, she thanked him, they said their goodbyes and hung up. 

When Olivia looked up from the casefile in front of her, the ghost of a smile still on her lips, Rollins was standing in the doorway to her office, her eyes wide and her cheeks bright pink. 

“What is it, Rollins?” Olivia asked pointedly, and the detective regained her composure. 

“I did some preliminary digging in the perp’s social media. I emailed some of it to you. I thought you might want to see what we found.”

“I’ll look it over. I should have the warrant for more by this afternoon.”

“Thanks, Sergeant.” Rollins turned to leave, then hesitated. After a moment, she walked up to the edge of Olivia’s desk, right next to her, her cheeks stained pink again. “Listen, Liv, when I walked in, you were on the phone with Barba.” Rollins had her head turned almost to the side and her eyes trained on the floor, a familiar and infuriating look she often wore when she didn’t want to give Olivia bad news.

Olivia resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Yeah, Amanda, I was getting the warrant. Is that a problem?” 

“No, Sergeant, it’s no problem,” Rollins began, still visibly uncomfortable. She met Olivia’s eyes. “But when you hung up, you didn’t call him Barba. You called him baby.” 

Olivia’s stomach dropped, and she paused.

“I think you misheard me, Detective.”

Rollins raised her eyebrows, clearly not buying her excuse. “I must have.” She didn’t look away.

Olivia honestly couldn’t remember what she’d said. They’d been up most of the night and early in the morning with a fussy, cranky Noah, and before they hung up their call, they were confirming lunch plans. He had called her _querida_ and said he couldn’t wait to see her. _He probably had the goddamn sense to close his office door,_ Olivia thought bitterly. 

She called him baby sometimes, in the heat of the moment or in the middle of the night or when she was making up for teasing him too harshly by soothing his bruised ego. She could tell he liked it, so she’d taken to doing it when she was greeting him and thanking him, too. She loved the way his eyes got a little darker, the way he licked his lips when she said it. But she wouldn’t call him that at work. She was a professional. A detective. She chose her words carefully. She looked back at Rollins’s face, and knew she was fucked. 

“Listen, Amanda—"

Rollins lowered her eyebrows and softened her facial features. “Don’t worry, Liv. I wouldn’t say anything to anybody. This was a long time coming. I’m happy for you. And I mind my business.” She straightened herself and walked back around to the other side of the desk. “Just, you know.” She raised her eyebrows again. “Maybe mind your mouth.” She turned, and was gone.

By the time Olivia turned up at lunch, she was a mess of anxiety and guilt. She spotted Barba at a little table toward the back of the restaurant, and when she made her way to his side he squeezed her hand by way of greeting, smiling up at her from his phone. She didn’t squeeze back.

“Hey,” he said brightly. “I ordered your usual. I’m starving.”

“We have a problem,” she said.

“Is it that you forgot my file?” he asked, his eyes landing on her empty hands.

“Fuck. We have two problems.”

He smiled, lopsided and charming. “It’s fine. I’ll walk you back to the precinct and pick it up there.”

She blew out a sigh and sat down. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

He still looked too happy to see her, and it made her feel even worse. “What world-ending drama is sweeping through SVU now?” he asked.

“Amanda heard us on the phone.”

He furrowed his brow. “Yeah?”

Olivia remembered Amanda’s shifty eyes, her pink cheeks, and she got angry and embarrassed all over again. “She heard me call you baby.”

His face twisted into a smirk, and a glimmer of understanding reached his eyes. “How’d she hear that? You didn’t close your door?”

“No, I didn’t close my door,” she snapped. 

He smirked. “Whoops. I’m going to have to be really mean and scary next time I see her, aren’t I? You’re ruining my reputation, Sergeant.”

“Exactly,” she said. “If this gets out—”

Their food came just then, and she quieted, waiting for the server to finish setting the table. He picked a fry off his plate and popped it into his mouth. She caught herself getting distracted, staring longingly at his mouth while his jaw worked, and brought herself back down to reality. 

She continued. “If this gets out—”

“It won’t get out.” He was smirking around a mouthful of food.

“Why not?” 

“Plenty of reasons.” His eyes were laughing. “I’m scary, you’re scary, Rollins loves and respects you, she has no legs to stand on since she’s _definitely_ sleeping with Amaro—”

“We don’t know that,” she interjected.

“Oh, we know. We just can’t prove it.”

She deflated. She wondered if she was making too much of this, if she was just overworked and overtired and under stress. “Why aren’t you mad? I thought you were going to be mad.”

“Do you want me to be mad?” He cocked an eyebrow suggestively.

“I want you to understand that this is a big deal. I was inappropriate with you in a professional setting, and someone heard me. Next time it could be Dodds standing in my doorway.”

“Okay, okay, I understand,” he said, still smiling slightly, but without the teasing edge. “I know you’re upset and I’m sorry I didn’t take that seriously before. I was just happy to see you, and I’m too tired to catastrophize. What do you want to do?”

Her fight was gone. “Well, _now_ all I want to do is kiss you. This is the problem.”

“I know it is, querida. We’ll think about it. Do you want me to come over after dinner?”

She did. They could think about it then. When they weren’t so tired, and he didn’t look so damn sexy in her favorite pink tie. By the end of the meal, he’d gotten her to smile, even laugh a little, and she felt like maybe the sky wasn’t falling. She let him walk her to the precinct but made him stay by the elevators while she ducked into her office to get his file, and she still couldn’t look Amanda in the eyes. When she got home to Noah, it was all she could do to get through dinner and bath time, and when he fell asleep, she did, too.

She woke up to the bed shifting under new weight next to her, and she opened her bleary eyes to see her Rafael slipping under the comforter next to her. He had already stripped down to his undershirt and boxers, and he plugged his phone in on the charger he’d bought for her apartment before burrowing down in the blankets and turning to face her. 

“Hi,” she whispered. 

“Hi,” he whispered back. “I didn’t mean to wake you. You didn’t answer the door so I used my key. Go back to sleep.”

She shifted closer to him, tangling her legs between his and reaching a hand up around him to stroke the hair at the nape of his neck. “We were supposed to talk,” she said.

“Do you want to talk?” he murmured, smiling softly at her and pulling his face closer to her own to grant her easier access to his neck. 

“No,” she whispered, smiling back, and she reached forward to kiss him. Her mouth was thick with sleep, and she kissed him lightly at first, but as his scent hit her, warm and familiar and so good, their kiss deepened and changed. She pressed up flush against him, hitching her leg around his to pull his hips closer, closer. He moaned lightly into her mouth, and she felt his desire growing against her, sparking her own need deep in her belly. She let herself enjoy the friction between their bodies as their tongues danced together, until he broke off their kiss, his breath ragged. He moved to hover over her, bracing himself on his forearms on either side of her and running his hands through her hair, claiming her mouth urgently, hungrily. 

His lips trailed from her mouth to her chin, her jaw, then her neck. He sucked lightly on her throat, skimming his teeth across her skin but careful not to leave a mark, before moving down to her collarbone, her shoulder, the top of her breast. His mouth was hot against her, and he trailed his tongue over her goosebumps like he was reading her skin. Her hands stayed in his hair, tugging lightly, scratching against his scalp. He hissed and freed her breasts from her tank top, massaging, caressing, palming, pinching, and she tried valiantly to stifle her moans under his attention. His mouth replaced his hands on her breasts and his hand moved lower, down her stomach, to the waistline of her sweatpants, where he ran his nails low across her abdomen. “Okay?” he asked against her skin, and she nodded, then dragged his face up to her own. While she kissed him, he slipped a hand into her sweats.

He ground his palm down against her, firm, and she bucked up against the unexpected force of his touch. He swallowed her moan and slipped a finger inside her, crooking it against her, delivering expert strokes and delicious pressure in exactly the right spots. He bit her bottom lip at the same time that he added another finger, then sped up his ministrations, broke off their kiss and whispered filthy, wonderful, mouthwatering promises in her ear. All she could say was “yes, baby, yes, please” as he continued to whisper about her body, his need, the glorious things they’d done together and the things he still wanted to do, until she was biting her lip, shaking, quivering, seeing stars, and finally coming, bucking off the bed and into his hand and losing herself entirely under his touch. When she came down, his hand was still on her hip, and his lips were in her hair. Her breathing slowed, and her boy stilled, but her desire was still raging within her. She turned to face him.

“Hi,” she whispered again.

“Hi,” he said. He had a secret smile that he saved just for her, for these moments. It was different than any smile he ever wore at work—not smug or sardonic or self-deprecating at all, just adoring and sweet. That was the smile she’d had on her mind when she’d slipped up and called him baby at work in front of Amanda. Who could blame her for wanting him, for loving him, after she’d seen him smile like that? 

She kissed his smile, then his nose, then his chin. She nipped at her favorite spot on his neck, then kissed his breastbone through his undershirt. She was making her way down, down, and she could feel the muscles in his body wind tight under her mouth and hands as he realized what she was going to do. When her face was level with his navel, she started using her tongue, inching down so agonizingly slow that he whispered a curse and fisted both his hands in her sheets. She noticed his cock twitch when she nipped at his hipbone, and she took pity on him, taking him in her hand and loving on him, slow and smooth through his boxers. Finally, she pulled him out of his boxers and into her mouth. 

They’d gotten used to each other in the weeks that they’d been doing this regularly, and she knew his body as well as he knew hers. She swirled her tongue around the head of his clock, then flattened it against his slit and licked hard and slow and dirty. Her hands moved slowly, twisting a little at his base, and she worked him into her mouth a little at a time. When she had finally swallowed him down, she hollowed out her cheeks, moved her hand down to graze and then cup his balls, and she moved slowly, deliberately, up and down along his length while his hands found her hair and his mouth hissed and swore and groaned above her. She picked up the pace, and his words changed in tone. She was a _goddess, a miracle, amazing,_ she was _perfect, so good, too good, don’t stop._ After minutes of this she was finally swallowing him down, hot liquid gathering on the back of her tongue, and he was trying to control the way his hips jerked up into her, but she didn’t care. This was how she liked him. In her bed, under her spell, out of control. 

She continued to suck and tease him until he whined for mercy, his hands finding her own and pulling her up to eye level. She burrowed into his arms, her head on his bicep and her mouth on his ear. She nibbled idly at his earlobe while he came down until he turned to capture her lips with his own. They kissed lazily for a few minutes before he turned his body again towards hers. 

“How was your day, querida?”

She answered him honestly. “Exhausting. Mortifying. We really do need to talk,” she whispered. 

“I know,” he said. “Boundaries. We have to keep what we’re doing here separate from work. I’ve been thinking about it.”

The idea that he had worried for her, had come up with a plan to soothe her anxieties, was a balm on her weary heart. He was so caring, so careful, always. “What do you think?”

“I think I won’t bring work here anymore. And you shouldn’t talk to me about work while we’re at home. You should use your desk phone to call me unless it’s an emergency. We’ll compartmentalize, we’ll set stricter roles. Eventually I’m going to piss you off again at work, and you can’t go easy on me because I made you come the night before, and vice versa.”

She slapped lightly at his shoulder at the reference, but she understood. “Compartmentalize. I can do that.” 

“I know you can. We did for a long time.” She remembered what life was like before, when they’d give in and sleep together about once a year, and then try to forget about it the other 364 days. 

“We didn’t do it that well,” she reminded him, and he huffed a laugh. 

“We did well enough that neither of our bosses ever noticed, and that’s the objective here. Carmen and Amanda can suspect whatever they want as long as they don’t actually see anything.”

“What did Carmen say?” Olivia asked, alarmed. 

“Ah,” he said, blushing at the slip. “That’s the other thing. I also forgot to close my door when we were on the phone. She heard every word.” 

“Oh my God, Rafael,” she laughed, remembering how tender he’d been on the phone that morning. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. How embarrassing.”

“I’m not embarrassed at all,” he said, nuzzling his face into her hair. “I’d shout it from the rooftops if I could. I’d get your name tattooed on my arm, wear embarrassing shirts I ordered off the Internet about how my girlfriend is one of New York’s finest. I’d even tell my mom about you, let her start pressuring me again about marriage and Mass and making her an abuelita if it wouldn’t cause both our careers to implode.” 

She sighed contentedly in his arms, the images he’d conjured causing a warm kind of joy to course through her body. “Compartmentalize,” she said drowsily, and he nodded against her hair. 

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Compartmentalize. For now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This very tropey chapter takes place during the break between seasons 15 and 16 and between chapters 2 and 3 of A One-Time Thing.
> 
> Sorry this took me so long. I got stuck halfway through, and my grad classes started Monday. The next update might take a little while too, because I have two medical procedures happening next week, but after that things should slow down. The next few chapters are established relationship/fluff/smut/behind-the-scenes goodness.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olivia and Rafael work a case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some brief victim-blaming language here that may be triggering for some. Take care, and fight the patriarchy.

“Guilty,” Olivia said elatedly, stepping out from the kitchen to greet Rafael at her apartment door. “You’re amazing.” 

He took two long steps toward her and kissed her happily, hungrily, one hand on her jaw and the other digging his fingers in around her waist. She was still in her work clothes, sans blazer, and there was a dish towel in one of her hands. She kept the damp cloth far away from his too-expensive suit, but used her other hand to run her fingers through his perfectly coiffed hair before resting it against the back of his neck. 

This what she’d been longing to do when she congratulated him in the courtroom after the jury handed down a guilty verdict for the rape of Evie Barnes. The case was full of victim blaming, slut shaming, and personal attacks, plus the insufferably sanctimonious attitude of John Buchanan when he thought he had a slam dunk, and Barba had still won, goddammit. Evie was vindicated, validated, safe. Olivia wanted to grab hold of Rafael right there, in front of that asshole Buchanan and the press and everyone, mess him up, mark him as hers. She settled for much less in the courtroom. But this embrace, his tongue in her mouth and her fingers in his hair, was all she could think about for most of the night. 

They broke apart and pressed their foreheads together, breathing heavily but still smiling triumphant smiles. “Have you eaten?” she asked. 

“Carmen brought me a salad around seven,” he responded. “I’ve been working on drafting a more detailed press release than the interview I gave after the verdict. This case being what it is, it made some headlines. I want to send the right message.”

She nodded. He always tread a little more lightly in cases dealing with sex workers. His first high-profile long-shot case was the rape of a sex worker by two johns, and he wore that conviction like a badge of honor. When she met him, back when he pretended to be all bravado and innuendo and arrogance, she’d assumed it was a publicity thing. But more than two years since that meeting, she’d watched him work less public violent crimes against sex workers with a kind of quiet tenacity that she didn’t quite know how to interpret. It made her incredibly proud of what they did, and hopeful about what they could do together.

She followed him into the kitchen and watched him pour himself a drink. “How’s Evie?” he asked before taking his first sip. 

She considered. “She’s holding on. She’s happy about the verdict, but she got a letter expelling her from Hudson and ordering her to vacate the premises by next week after the trial ended.” His eyebrows rose. He hadn’t heard yet. “I told her I would speak with President Roberts.”

“You try that,” he said knowingly. “If it comes down to it, I’ll find her a good civil lawyer to sue Hudson and President Roberts out of their pants.” 

She smiled and kissed his cheek, lingering a little. “How can I get you out of yours?” 

He snorted and smiled a cocky, sarcastic smile, his tongue in his cheek and his eyes darting off to the side, that made him look ten years younger. “A few more bad lines like that should do the trick.”

She pulled him into her bedroom, very gently, by his tie, then drew a hot, gratuitously sudsy bubble bath. When she and Brian had first rented this apartment, she was deeply immersed in trauma therapy, fresh off her first encounter with William Lewis and exploring the completely foreign concept of self-care. She fell in love with two different apartments, but settled on this one for its deep, wide, luxurious bathtub. It was great for bathing babies and expelling flashbacks, but with the jets and the depth, it was really made for lovers.

She stripped his clothes off slowly, letting her nails trace along his bare shoulders and chest. When she removed his pants, she let her hand linger at his zipper, skirting along his length and eliciting frustrated sighs from his mouth. He afforded her the same treatment, and by the time they were both fully undressed, the energy between them was electric, buzzing with anticipation and desire. 

They sank into the bathwater together and she sat between his legs, leaning against his chest, luxuriating in his wandering hands making a slow mess of her mind. She loved him like this. Confident, optimistic, deliberate. He cupped her breasts, massaged her shoulders, wrapped his arms around her middle and pulled her close against him, his nose buried in the crook of her neck. She could feel him growing hard behind her, and she rocked and slid against him, reveling in the feeling of his arousal against her back. 

His slow teasing curled her toes and gave her goosebumps that he chased away with his teeth and tongue. Eventually, his hands found her center and methodically, patiently, took her apart. His left hand rolled her nipple between his fingers while his right drew little circles against her most sensitive parts. She panted, gasped, keened, nearly prayed for release, while his hands moved rhythmically against her, inside her, and his mouth licked the sweat and bathwater off her spine and shoulders and neck. “I love you,” he said low and breathy in her ear. She could only sigh back. 

When she was finally doing her best approximation of begging to feel him inside her, they shifted up onto their knees and she came down against him in one hard, clean stroke. Her insides were already clenching around him while his hands moved to brush her nipple, grasp her rib cage, and his teeth sank into the flesh of her shoulder. She melted into her first orgasm, quivering helplessly against him, crying out softly as the water lapped against their skin. He groaned and whispered her name against her shoulder while she shuddered and collapsed back against him. 

Then he began to move behind her, powerful, smooth strokes, while his hands gripped her hips and pulled her back toward his lap. She braced her arms on the edges of the tub and pushed her hips back, relishing the forcefulness of his thrusts and the way everything felt more intense in the heat and the water and the slippery soap. After he hit a particularly delicate and delicious spot deep inside her, she sank down into all fours. 

He groaned as their angle changed and he entered her more fully, deeply, primally. His hand reached around her waist to find her clitoris, but hers was already there, moving jerkily, frantically, so he grabbed onto her hips and rocked against her, swearing and bucking and praising her with every breath. He varied his speed and intensity until he couldn’t hold himself back any longer, and he was coming with a cry, sending her into her own sweet release. 

They slid bonelessly into their original positions, and she shivered before he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tight against his chest. 

“I love you,” he repeated. 

She smiled. “You had a good day.” 

“We had a good day,” he corrected her. “This was a big win. Do you know how many times I’ve heard a variation of ‘You can’t rape a hooker?’ Even in law school, in the DA’s office. Like outdated, completely arbitrary respectability politics and a teenage girl’s sexual history have anything to do with consent and assault. It’s disgusting.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“Right,” he said, drawing her a little closer. “I know.” 

She leaned her head to kiss his hand where it rested on her shoulder. “Evie’s safe. That’s what’s important. The cultural change will come.”

But it didn’t. Olivia sat in shock at the sentencing hearing as she watched Evie crumble under the judge’s judgment, his indictment of her character, his refusal to sentence her rapist for the crime for which a jury had previously found him guilty. That was the only word for what Olivia saw happening in that courtroom to Evie’s newfound self-worth, her belief that she would ever be safe again: it crumbled, it broke apart, it blew away. 

She’d never seen Barba hit the roof like that. She wasn’t sure he ever had. She heard things about him flying off the handle during the Alex Muñoz case or when the Brooklyn DA’s office convened a grand jury against her, but she’d never seen him in action like this. He was nearly found in contempt of court for his barely-controlled rage against Judge Briggs. As he railed against the judge’s actions and the effects they would have on rape law, it occurred to her that his anger ran deeper than the judge’s abuse of power or the high-profile nature of the case. They had promised Evie she was safe now, and she wasn’t. 

Olivia tried her best to console Evie, to salvage the wreckage of the girl’s situation, before coming to find him. It was a Friday night, and they had made tenuous celebratory plans, even hiring Lucy to stay with Noah overnight so they could have some private time at his place, but she knew when she watched him storm out of the courtroom that their plans had been postponed indefinitely. She imagined he had probably written a scathing press release for the following morning and a strongly-worded letter to the committee on judicial conduct about Judge Briggs, at the very least. 

She found him in his office, scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad, his tongue tucked between his teeth and his brow furrowed. His shoulders looked tense under his suspenders, and his jacket and vest were crumpled up in a chair next to his conference table, like maybe he’d balled them up and thrown them there. She shut the door gently behind her and leaned against it, waiting for him to notice her. She usually took great pleasure in watching him work, but the way his fingers grasped the pen, white-knuckled and desperate, nearly cracked her heart in two. 

She heard him grinding his teeth, a noise she recognized from his sweaty, tearful, middle-of-the-night stress dreams. He would wake up frustrated, his head full of false logic and his voice stuck in his throat, images of his father looming behind his eyes. He was in a waking stress dream, she realized. She walked over from her spot near the door and sat on his desk, next to his notepad, and put a hand down to stop the path of his pen. He dropped the utensil in frustration, then leaned forward and buried his face in her stomach. She sighed and combed her nails through his hair. 

“You did everything you could,” she said quietly. 

“That’s the worst part,” he responded from around her navel. 

“I know,” she soothed, scratching light patterns into his scalp. “Is there anything else you can try?”

“I’m filing a motion to appeal,” he responded, sounding defeated already. “I don’t know if McCoy will let me take Pryor back to court.”

“Do you think Briggs is just an asshole, or do you think he was paid off?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I wouldn’t put either one past Briggs at this point, but I don’t know about Buchanan. Rita doesn’t think so.”

“You called Rita about this?”

“Rita hears everything. She called me.”

Olivia sighed again. “That woman is a hurricane. I wish she was still on our side.”

“That door only goes one way.” He lifted his face from her stomach and moved his hands to her hips. “How’s Evie?”

Olivia winced. “How would you be right now?” He dropped his face back into her stomach. “You did what you could, Rafael. More than anyone in this office could have or would have done. It’s like you said, it’s a cultural change. You’re going to tear this judge apart, and this won’t happen again.” 

“It already happened to her.”

“I know,” she soothed. “It’s never going to feel right. It probably won’t even feel better, unless you can nail him on the appeal.” 

She rested her hands on his shoulders. She kept an eye on the door, although the building was mostly empty. She’d passed Carmen going home for the night when she walked in, but security was still around, and there was always a chance McCoy would stop by to check on Barba now that word about his performance in court had gotten out. “We can’t do this here, baby," she said gently, pulling him into her embrace. "Let’s go home. Your place. We can order dinner and drink about it, and you can come back tomorrow and save the world.”

He looked back up at her, and she could see the reluctance in his eyes, the instinct to bury himself in this case and, in turn, let the case bury him. If she let him, he’d work on his potentially fruitless appeal all night and through the weekend, maybe stopping to take cat naps on his couch and drinking all the coffee he had on hand. She understood this part of him, even identified with it. She was so familiar with the instinct to lose yourself trying to protect a victim that she knew when time wasn't on their side, when the instinct was more or less pointless. There was nothing more they could do for Evie Barnes. Maybe not ever, but certainly not tonight. 

“Trust me,” she said, and she felt his will give way to her own. She pulled him up by his suspenders and watched him get dressed, then squeezed his hand before reaching for his office door. “I love you,” she whispered, and he squeezed her hand back. They walked out, shoulder to shoulder, like comrades, into a city that felt a little more dirty than it did the night before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place during Season 16, Episode 5, "Pornstar's Requiem."


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A case reminds Barba of his past.

He couldn’t let them go home together.

At first, when Olivia stormed into his office demanding AJ Martin’s immediate arrest, Rafael was skeptical. It was his job to be skeptical, although Olivia’s derisive tone was like a punch to the gut. He knew she had a strong feeling about this case, but his hadn’t kicked in yet. She was worried about the cops not talking to Paula and AJ separately after the incident, about the preferential treatment the former football star might have received from the police and the DA, the slap on the wrist plea deal that didn’t feel like proper penance for whatever blow had knocked Paula unconscious the night AJ dragged her out of the Met gala and into the back of his SUV. The DA shouldn’t have taken the responding officers’ word, she said pointedly. “I take your word all the time,” he reminded her. If she couldn’t convince him, he couldn’t convince a jury. He needed more.

Then he saw the video. He stood silent and alone, watching Paula’s interview through the one-way mirror, his hands clutching his own forearms tightly to remind him that he was in Olivia’s office, the office that smelled like her, that he was an adult, he wasn’t a scared little boy holding a damp cloth to his mother’s bloody lip while she made the same excuses he heard pouring out of Paula Martin’s mouth. "I started in," and, "I embarrassed him in front of important people," and "He was just trying to protect me," and "We've put it behind us." Rafael was reluctant to meet AJ Martin for reasons he was ashamed to admit, but when he looked him in the eye, Rafael knew instantly that he wasn’t sorry. AJ had hurt Paula before and would do it again. And again.

He couldn’t let them go home together.

When he watched the televised interview announcing Paula and AJ’s marriage, he felt a familiar dread in his gut that he thought he’d left behind thirty years ago. He recognized the relief in Paula Martin’s eyes, and the steel in AJ’s. He remembered his mother sniffing a bouquet of flowers with a black eye. He wondered where their child was that night. There was an image in his mind of a little boy curled up under a dining room table, but the image wasn’t of AJ Martin’s son. 

He woke up in Olivia’s bed the night before the trial drenched in a cold sweat, his hands curled into fists. His jaw ached, and his eyes stung. There were filthy, degrading phrases rolling around in his head, words from another generation and another kind of man, a bitter, violent, angry man. He was hyperventilating, but he was sure he could smell stale cigarette smoke in the air around him. He panicked for a moment, wondering if he had wet the bed.

Olivia sat up next to him and turned on her lamp, then pulled his chin into her hands and examined him. They’d been here before, when either Rafael or Olivia or Noah woke up scared, reliving an ancient pain they had all done their best to leave behind. Waking up with them was so different from the nights when he would wake up alone. 

Olivia’s touch grounded him, albeit briefly. The light from her bedside lamp reminded him of where he was, spatially and temporally, and her movement next to him stirred up the familiar and comforting smell of Olivia’s freshly-washed hair. He wasn’t in the Bronx. He wasn’t nine years old. He was home, with the family he’d found and fallen in love with. But he could still hear the cursing and yelling from decades ago, only audible over his own labored breathing. He let a few hot tears leak from his weary eyes as his body slithered down farther under the sheets, coming to a shuddering rest. He wondered if he would ever be free. 

Olivia slid down beside him and nestled herself under his arm, leaning her head on his shoulder and kissing his jaw. “Tell me what you need,” she whispered.

He swallowed. “Talk to me.” He needed her voice to drown out what was left of his father in his head.

She drew in a breath and considered. “It’s almost Thanksgiving,” she said in his ear. “Next week. We never talked about whether you were celebrating with your mother. I was going to invite you to the squad Thanksgiving.”

“There’s a squad Thanksgiving?” he asked.

“Yep. There’s a squad Christmas, too. I started the tradition,” she said. “I was tired of spending all my holidays alone. Amanda doesn’t have any family in town, and Fin’s son usually spends the holidays with his mother or his in-laws. Munch stops by most years, and I think Nick will be around.”

His mind was starting to quiet. He thought about Olivia in the kitchen, stirring mashed potatoes, bending to place the turkey in the oven, licking pumpkin pie filling off her fingers. “Do you cook for squad Thanksgiving?”

She stroked his cheek. “I do what I can. You could help, if you want to. We drink, and we eat too much, and we tell inappropriate work stories. This year will be special. It’s Noah’s first Thanksgiving.”

He smiled. “Are you going to dress him up?”

“Of course I’m going to dress him up, are you kidding? I bought him three different outfits. One of them is a completely ridiculous turkey costume I found around Halloween. I budgeted twelve pages of his baby book for this.”

He huffed a laugh through his nose. Noah’s baby book was going to be a four-volume tome. 

She continued, “And after that is Christmas.” She pushed herself up onto her elbows and leaned over him, trailing her fingers over his chest. She looked so pretty in the lamplight. She was tousled, tired, but sweet and open. Looking in her eyes made him feel more present, more sure. “I think we should go somewhere. Rent a cabin or go to a ski lodge or something. Get out of the city, drive around looking at the lights, build a fire and fool around in front of it. We can make cookies and dress Noah up as baby Santa.”

“How many pages of his baby book did you budget for that?”

She smiled at him again. “You’ll think about it?”

“It’s all I want to think about,” he said, pulling her closer against his chest. 

He couldn’t keep the note of regret from his voice, and he knew she heard it. “I know this case is hard for you,” she said. “I’m so sorry it’s so public, on top of being so personal.”

He turned and pressed his forehead against hers. “She sounds just like Mamí.”

“I know she does.” 

“I should visit her more,” he said. It was hard. She still had that same dining room table, usually cluttered with forms and files from her charter school. The dining room was different, more cheerful and open than when he was a boy. But he could still see the crack in one table leg, repaired sloppily by his father with some wood glue, from the time he had pulled Rafael out from his hiding spot under the table and nearly thrown him through its surface. 

“You do what you can, Rafael. You do what’s healthy for you.” She sat up. “You’re a better man. You’re raising a better man. That’s all you can do.” 

“I can prosecute AJ Martin,” he reminded her. 

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “You can do that too.”

So he did. The case wore on him. Olivia testified beautifully, condemning AJ without blaming Paula, and she was cool under Rita’s personal pressure. The ME was convincing, although Rafael had a feeling the medical data wasn’t really going to sway the jury. It was hard to try to provoke AJ’s anger—asking, “Did you love her here?” and replaying the chilling video of AJ manhandling and abusing his wife. He needed the jury to see what kind of explosion AJ was capable of, but his mother’s voice rang out in his head the whole time, _Shh, Rafi, hush now, don’t make him angry, mijo, your mouth is going to get us in trouble._ He was shaking when he sat back down.

It was even harder when he had to cross-examine Paula, to ask her questions he always wanted to ask his mother, in conversations he had in his head but would never have with the woman who raised him. He asked, “What AJ raises his voice at Junior, how does that make you feel?” and “Mrs. Martin, when you see the look on your son’s face, how does that make you feel?” and his eyes stung with how badly he wanted an answer, but he didn’t let the tears fall. Paula didn’t have an answer. Lucia probably wouldn’t have one either. He didn’t know if there was an answer that could make it right. He didn’t know why he still thought he could make it right. 

The guilty verdict came back on a Friday, and he didn’t feel the typical wave of relief and elation he associated with winning a trial. A guilty verdict was rarely a truly happy ending, but for the Martins, it was certainly only a painful beginning. He had done what he came to do—Paula and AJ were not going home together. Paula and Junior would be safe while AJ served his sentence. What they chose to do after that was out of his hands. 

He took Olivia’s advice and focused instead on what he could control. He went home, and he slept off a week’s worth of terrible nights. He didn’t dream. He stood over Noah’s crib the next morning, watching the little boy sleep soundly in a set of elephant pajamas, and he wanted more than anything for him to feel protected, supported, safe to speak and imagine and explore. Rafael silently promised to spend the rest of his life showing Noah how to be a better man than the ones they came from, the ones who didn’t deserve to know them and couldn’t hurt them anymore. 

On Thanksgiving morning, he wrangled the baby into a turkey costume, letting Olivia snap ridiculous photos for the baby book, and they prepared for a holiday with the family he chose. 

When the squad all arrived, he was quiet, contemplative, a little in awe throughout the night. There was no cursing or yelling or stale cigarette smoke, except a little bit from Rollins, who laughed after every exclamation. There was love, not anger or fear, in everyone’s eyes. Olivia did lick pumpkin pie filling off her fingers, and he wanted the image imprinted on the back of his eyelids. He watched Noah all night, and the little boy never once seemed afraid. There were no cracks in the legs of the dining room table. 

It was as close to free as he ever thought he’d get.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said I had a bunch of fluff coming up and then I wrote this. This chapter takes place during Season 16, Episode 8, Spousal Privilege. The writers spent a lot of time during this episode exploring Nick and Amanda's complicated relationship with domestic violence and I understand why to a degree, but I always imagined this case would be difficult for Barba to prosecute, particularly because Paula Martin was a reluctant witness and they had a young son.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olivia and Rafael have too much to drink.

“Do you think we should develop healthier coping mechanisms?” Olivia’s fifth glass of wine asked the spinning room, her head resting on the carpet and her feet propped lazily on the coffee table. 

“Do you think we have time?” Rafael’s fourth glass of whiskey responded around a faceful of pillow. He was spread out on the couch in his sweats and an old t-shirt from his mom’s charter school, his winter pajamas. His t-shirt was riding up, exposing his belly, and his feet were bare. Despite the smattering of gray in his hair, he looked surprisingly carefree, comfortable, like a child. His left arm hung over the sofa’s edge, and their hands were resting, fingers intertwined, on the floor. 

“What do you mean, ‘do we have time?’ Like, time before we die?” Olivia asked, giggly despite the morbidity of her question. They’d started the night dejected, defeated. Deputy Chief Patton of Atlanta PD had taken a plea deal for assaulting one of his junior detectives in a hotel room at a conference in the city. The deal was the right call, but Patton would collect his full pension and serve no jail time, while the women he’d assaulted, Detective Taymor and their own Detective Amanda Rollins, had been abused, maligned, and nearly professionally ruined. After a couple drinks, they started to push the unfairness to the backs of their minds, to relax, to let themselves enjoy each other in a way they hadn’t been able to since New Year’s Eve. Now they were winding down, sobering up, and the weight of the week was starting to hit her.

“No,” he responded, smiling as an automatic response to her laughter. His voice was softer and lighter and higher than most people ever heard it. “I mean time in the day. Between el amiguito and work and court and our dumb friends. When during the day could we take up—I dunno, what do you think, fucking knitting or doing puzzles or something? We don’t have time.”

“We have time for this,” she countered. 

“Yeah, but we’re already so good at this. Look at what a great job I’m doing getting drunk on your couch on a weeknight. I’m a natural. Why do you want me to squander my gift?”

She laughed and squeezed his hand. “You’re right—”

“Say that again into the microphone, please.”

She laughed again. “You’re right, baby. You’re very good at being drunk on my couch. Do you know what else you’re good at?”

He sighed. “So many things. I’m obnoxiously talented. It’s incredibly burdensome. But I believe the answer you’re looking for is ‘being drunk in your kitchen while making you a grilled cheese.’”

“Talented and _smart,_ too. It’s like you went to Harvard.”

He released her hand and flopped over on his back, then sat up slowly, groaning. “What kind of best friend slash illicit-forbidden-monogamous-but-no-labels-for-plausible-deniability-reasons sex partner would I be if I didn’t make you, my drunk best friend slash the love of my life, a grilled cheese?”

“Well, when you put it like that...,” she agreed as she followed him toward her kitchen for their end-of-the-night drunk ritual. She sat at the bar, her head still spinning mildly, as she watched him in the kitchen, pulling out groceries and dishes like he lived there, which he basically did every single weekend and at least two nights a week. Even in her drunken state, Olivia still knew that they were kidding themselves with the “no labels means no disclosure” bullshit. She wasn’t sure how long they could keep it up, but she also couldn’t see a way out. “Is that how you would describe me to a stranger? Your best friend, or the love of your life?”

“Why would I describe you to a stranger? I don’t talk to strangers anymore. You’ve introduced me to too many murderers.” He was buttering the bread, smiling at his own joke, and she was temporarily transfixed by his bare forearms. They were strong, veiny, a sturdy place to grip when she was out of her mind with pleasure and lust and needed some way to tether herself to this earth. He turned his back to her to slice the cheese, two different kinds from her favorite deli, and the spell was broken. 

“No, it’s like,” Olivia started, fuzzy-headed and frustrated. “Like say for example you’re in Los Angeles at a conference and no one you know is around and you’re buying me something thoughtful from the hotel gift shop because you miss me—“

“What thoughtful gift could I find in a hotel gift shop?”

“—I don’t know, a book about local murderers or a keychain with my name on it or something. And you go to check out and the cashier asks if it’s a gift and you say yes and they ask who it’s for—“

“Nosy cashier. Is the cashier going to murder me?”

“—No, the cashier is a Hollywood hopeful who’s trying to make a good impression in case you’re someone important or famous. You’re in LA, focus up. Anyway, they ask who the gift is for and it’s for me. What do you tell them?” 

Her sandwich was now sizzling in the skillet under the press, and the smell was intoxicating her even further. He paused, obviously thinking about her question. He started to tip over just a little, and he leaned forward across the bar to steady himself. “I don’t know. My partner? That sounds too clinical, right? But ‘the love of my life’ is a little wordy. 'Girlfriend' makes me sound like I’m having a midlife crisis and you ride shotgun in my red sportscar or something.” He ran a hand over his face. “I don’t know. I always just think of you as Olivia, my Liv. I’m not sure what I would call you in this hypothetical hotel gift shop in Los Angeles.”

She flushed with the pleasure of hearing he thought of her as his, something that she knew but still loved to hear, but she wasn’t quite satisfied with his answer. She thought dimly that maybe she should drop it, but the conversation felt strangely unfinished. “Do you think we’ll ever stop being hypothetical?”

He furrowed his brows and turned to flip her sandwich, then leaned back over the counter and reached for her hand. “I don’t know. I hope so. Does it bother you, that we are?”

She started to wish she hadn’t drunk so much wine. Or maybe she wished she hadn’t opened her mouth. She couldn’t tell. “Most of the time, it doesn’t bother me. You’re the best ADA we’ve ever had. Best-looking, too. I would miss you so much if you left. I want to keep working together, but I want other things, too.”

“What other things do you want?” he asked earnestly, pulling her hand to his mouth and kissing it sweetly, but sloppily. 

“This week, I wanted to put that picture of you and me and Noah in the snow from Christmas Eve at the ski lodge up on my desk. I wanted to stop hiding the moments that make me the happiest. To stop having to pretend I don’t know you the way that I do, that I’m guessing that you’re biting your nails waiting for the jury to come back when I _know_ that you’re pacing around your office and messing with your cuff links. I wanted to be allowed to be proud of you in public when you made that deal, even though it wasn’t what you wanted.” He turned to the stove again, to shut off the heat, plate and cut her sandwich, and pour her a glass of water. While his back was turned, she continued, “I want this to be your home. I want Noah to be your son. I want you, always. I just sometimes can’t see how we can be like this, _hypothetical,_ always.” 

He froze, just a beat, then faced her and placed her food and drink in front of her. He put the groceries back in the refrigerator and sat at the counter next to her, leaning his head on her shoulder. She bit into her sandwich, and it was a revelation, the way only drunk grilled cheese could be. 

“I think I might be too drunk to have this conversation,” he said slowly. 

“Why?” she asked. 

He kissed her shoulder. “Because all I want to say is fuck it. Let’s stop being hypothetical. I’ll just quit my job and get a new job that’s not so soul-sucking and I’ll move in and we’ll do this for real. Or you can quit. Or we can both quit and move to Connecticut and get a house and a big yard and adopt a dog for Noah to grow up with. I can teach or go into the private sector and you can coast on your excellent reputation and write a book and do speaking engagements around the country when you get bored with being retired.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, lifting his head off her shoulder to look her in the eye. “This week was _awful,_ Liv. At least half of my weeks are awful, but this one... I had to ask Rollins to recount the specific details of her rape. I made her tell me things she’d never told anyone, things she couldn’t admit to herself. I’d never seen her cry before.”

“That wasn’t your fault, Rafael.” Olivia was still wracked with her own guilt about her relationship with Amanda. She regretted the way she didn’t really welcome her to the squad when she got to New York, how she was too consumed with hating and missing and mourning Elliot to see that the new detective was running from something in her “boys’ club” back home. She was ashamed of the way she handled Amanda’s relapse into gambling, both as her commanding officer and her friend, the way she was more concerned with looking like a good sergeant than she was with Amanda’s feelings. She knew about Amanda’s mitigating circumstances then—about how hard it was for her when Cragen retired, about how her Gambling Anonymous sponsor had fucked her over and humiliated her on permanent public record during a murder trial—and she’d still told Amanda she couldn’t trust her and didn’t want her on her squad. She made Amanda feel like SVU wasn’t her home, maybe she made her feel like she didn’t have one. She wondered if she’d ever be able to mend that fence. 

Rafael wasn’t the one with anything to be sorry for. Rafael was the one Olivia had found in her closet one morning after she’d woken up with Noah, resolutely putting on her running clothes so he could literally chase Amanda down during her morning jog and get her to confront her truth. He’d walked strangely all day after that, claiming he had strained a hamstring and that it was proof that running was stupid and dangerous. She continued, “Amanda knows you care about her. She knows you were trying to help.”

He leaned his head on the countertop. “It felt like the Lewis trial all over again, Liv. Grilling my friend, causing her pain, being terrified I was going to let her down. I couldn’t talk to you about it, and I wanted to, querida, so much. I made this job my life and I believe in what we do. But trials like this... I don’t know how many more of them I have in me.” He lifted his head to look at her again, his voice softer. 

He continued, “And then I think about falling asleep on Christmas Eve in front of the fire, and waking up next to you every day, and Noah playing in the snow, and I think, why am I risking all of that for this job?”

They were silent for a few moments, then she asked, “You already know why, don’t you?”

He nodded. “You do too. It’s the same reason you haven’t left after so many years. Because it’s not about me. It never was. It was about Amanda, it was about you. It was about Noah and Ellie Porter, Mehcad Carter, Evie Barnes, Jocelyn Paley. We take these cases that wouldn’t otherwise see trial, and sometimes we win. I don’t know how to stop doing that. I don’t think you do either. Who am I if I stop fighting for them? Am I someone you can still understand and love and respect?” 

She finished the last bite of her sandwich. He was right. They were too drunk for this conversation, but she felt sobered for the moment. “Where does that leave us?”

He sighed and leaned against her again. “I don’t know. I’m out of answers. Your turn.”

She considered. “Let’s go to bed.”

They stood up from their chairs and collected their dishes from the bar and the living room to put in the kitchen sink and save for tomorrow. She double-checked the lock on the door—a holdover from her PTSD—while he rinsed their glasses and wiped off the counters. They made their way to bed, and they climbed into their usual positions wordlessly. Her head was on his chest, his hand was in her hair, and her leg was crooked possessively over his middle. After a few moments of staring into the dark, listening to him breathe, she whispered, “I’m happy here.” 

He squeezed her tightly against him. “I am, too.”

“No, I mean,” she started again. She was tired, and her brain was slow, and she could already feel tomorrow’s hangover headache brewing in the middle of her forehead. “That’s where that leaves us, I think. I’m happy here. You’re happy here. We’ll stay here. _Hypothetical,_ to everyone but us. I think I might… be happier, if we could move forward. To hypothetical Connecticut with our son and our hypothetical dog. But it’s not like this is time sensitive, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m almost fifty. We’re not getting any younger, but what do we lose by getting older? We’ve got time. What’s between us isn’t going to expire. And one way or another, eventually one of us is going to retire, and we’ll have to figure it out all over again. We’re happy. Let’s just stay happy.”

He rolled to face her in the dark. “Are you sure?”

She pulled his face to hers and kissed him, sweet and slow, tasting the whiskey on his breath and feeling his stubble against her face. “Yes.”

He kissed her again, and she finally closed her eyes for sleep. 

When she woke up the next morning, Rafael was already awake, leaning against their headboard and scrolling through something on his phone. She nestled her head into his shoulder and breathed in the smell of him, cherishing the quiet of the morning and the few stolen moments of contentment. She peeked up at his phone and smiled involuntarily against his t-shirt.  


He was looking at listings of homes for sale, with big yards for growing boys and their dogs, in Connecticut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place after Season 16, Episode 10, Forgiving Rollins. That blue jogging jacket haunts my dreams.
> 
> If anyone wants to be digital friends I'm on tumblr with the same username. I mostly post dumb jokes and books but if I see Raùl, I reblog Raùl, pretty much every time.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olivia and Rafael celebrate their first Valentine's Day.

Olivia wondered idly if Rafael ever celebrated Valentine’s Day. When they were trying to be just friends, she never asked him about his Valentine’s Day plans, and he avoided learning about hers. Now the holiday was just a few days away, and she was still unsure. Olivia kind of liked Valentine’s Day, the way it brought color and warmth and magic to New York in February, an otherwise excruciatingly bleak environment. She could use a little color and warmth right now. 

They’d been squabbling a lot lately. It wasn’t ever anything serious, but they were both always so tense, exhausted, fraying at the seams. They were tired of winter, of ice and sludge and dirty gray snow. She was terrified that Noah would get sick again. She and Barba had disagreed about most of their cases lately, and the news about Johnny D being Noah’s biological father had caught them both completely off-guard. 

She thought Valentine’s Day might be a nice distraction for them both. And if he wasn’t into Valentine’s Day, maybe just a night away. Lucy had offered to spend the night of the 14th with Noah, “the only man in this city she cared to spend the holiday with,” and Olivia had impulsively taken her up on it, ignoring the knot of nerves in her stomach at the prospect of leaving her son for a night. She liked the idea of time blocked off just to be with Rafael. She was starting to make plans. 

When he’d showed up at her office after the squad’s Super Bowl Sunday undercover operation went sideways, Olivia was still wearing her undercover clothes, leather pants and a printed top with big hair and big earrings. He’d been at his monthly theatre date with Rita’s wife that night, and Olivia was a little ashamed when she had to call him into the precinct. She’d have to admit she’d taken advantage of his distraction so that she could carry out the undercover operation she knew he would vehemently oppose. 

His jaw twitched when he saw her, and he cocked an eyebrow and asked, “Do I want to know why you’re dressed like that?” Then he’d chewed her out. On the way home, he ignored her resolutely. When they finally made it into her apartment, he’d checked on Noah and thanked Lucy for her time without looking at Olivia, and she’d braced herself for another fight, a bigger fight. But then they got to her bedroom, and his hands were everywhere, and she realized he was anticipating something entirely different. 

“What did it for you?” she asked him a few moments later, an echo of the question he’d posed to her just before she took him home for the first time. It was just a little over two years ago, but it felt like a lifetime had passed between them. 

“Not sure,” he said breathlessly from somewhere near her navel. His breath was hot and his tongue and teeth were insistent. “I think it was the leather. Pull my hair.” She complied, and he groaned, and she thought she was forgiven. Then they’d both stopped thinking for the rest of the night.

He hadn’t stayed over since then, nearly two weeks ago. He’d spent a couple late nights in a row at his place with Carisi explaining the finer points of torts to help him with a new class he was struggling with. After that, his abuelita had fallen, and he was worried he would bring germs from the hospital home to a recuperating and vulnerable baby Noah. Then he was busy looking for assisted living facilities and packing up the remnants of the forty years his grandmother had spent in her apartment.

He stopped by so she could ask his opinion about Melinda Warner's revelation about Johnny D being Noah's biological father, and that was the first time he'd been in her apartment for nearly a week. He'd counseled and consoled her, and she had put Noah down for a nap and taken him into her arms. A few moments later they were fumbling with each other half-dressed on the couch, their mouths skirting and their hands grasping and they were so close, almost there, when Noah unexpectedly woke up and started crying, and Rafael realized he was late for work. It was the longest they’d been apart since shortly after Noah came home, and it was making them both feel unsteady and out of sync, on top of everything else that was keeping them up at night.

They needed time. Together, away. It was too late to get a reservation for a restaurant or a hotel in New York City for Valentine’s Day, but they could spend the evening at his apartment. She could cook. They could break in his bathtub. Maybe she could find something new to wear, she thought. Something made of leather.

She meant to broach the topic with him the Monday morning before Valentine's Day after Charmaine Briggs’s arraignment, but when she caught up to him in the hall, he was already speaking with someone, a slightly older woman in a fuchsia coat. Olivia fumbled for an excuse for following him out of the courtroom and finally said, “Barba, $100,000 for a homicide? Are you kidding me?”

When he looked back at her, his eyes flashed for a moment. “We’re lucky we didn’t get ROR. Uh, Sergeant Benson, this is my mother, Lucia Barba.” He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

“Oh,” Olivia said, smiling to hide her panic. She could see the resemblance, now that she knew to look for it. Lucia Barba was colorful, feminine, but Olivia could see the hard-earned steel in her eyes and her spine. 

Lucia was looking her up and down, appraising but not unfriendly. “Benson,” she said, recognition in her voice. “He talks about you. You drive him a little crazy.”

Olivia smiled at her candor. “Just doing my job,” she responded, smirking at Barba (and ogling him a little) as he walked away.

When his mother left and he came back to speak to her, they were both blushing. “Your mom okay?” she asked after a beat. 

“Yeah,” he said, fumbling with his suit jacket. “Just nailing down details about abuelita. Mamì’s... single minded. Efficient.”

Olivia smiled at the description, still blushing a little. She had just met his mother. And then her heart twinged, because she hadn’t _really_ met his mother. Sergeant Benson met ADA Barba’s mother, but Olivia hadn’t met Rafael’s. She tried to tell herself it was better this way, to ease into it. A little more quietly, she asked, “Are you coming by tonight?” 

He hesitated. “I have a meeting with the admissions director at the assisted living facility this evening. Is Noah still coughing?”

She deflated. “No, but he had a low-grade fever this morning.”

He expelled a sigh and reached a hand out to pull her to him, then remembered where they were and pulled it to the back of his neck instead. It felt like they were always reaching for each other and pulling away, lately. “I’ll call you.”

“Okay,” she said, and they went their separate ways. 

When their case wrapped up two days later, after Charmaine Briggs took a plea deal, they sat in her office decompressing, reflecting. “What are you going to be doing when you’re 85?” he asked her.

She considered. She still didn’t know what the future held for them, whether he was asking her a question or making her an offer. She didn’t know whether he believed in marriage, or even if he believed in Valentine’s Day. She knew that she loved him. She knew she would never stop. “Squabbling with you?” she asked.

He smiled. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day?” she asked after a long moment.

His smile grew. “Are you asking me to be your valentine, Sergeant Benson?”

“Sure,” she said. “Be my valentine. Let me wine and dine you. We can stay at your place. I got a sitter.”

He leaned forward against her desk. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” he repeated.

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said. “I have _plans._ ”

“Plans?” he asked, one eyebrow cocked.

“Secret plans.”

That night he called her, quietly crying, from the bathroom of his mother’s home. His abuelita had died. He felt guilty, and sad, and there was so much to do. He spent the night at his mom’s apartment, consoling her, then took two days off work to make arrangements. 

Olivia wanted to see him, to comfort him, and yet she knew it was better that she didn’t. Their relationship was professional bordering on friendly, according to her boss and his boss and, most importantly, his mother. Better not to spring anything on anyone now, to test their limits when he was already strung so tight. She settled for breathing in what lingered of Rafael’s scent on his pillow and clutching it to her chest tightly while she tried, and often failed, to fall asleep alone. 

He spent his nights in the Bronx, sending sparse text updates about arrangements. When she finally met him at his apartment on Valentine’s Day, he looked like he hadn’t shaved or slept or completed a thought since that afternoon in her office. 

“Hey,” she said in his doorway, and that was all it took for him to crumple in her arms.

He was tired, almost hysterical, and all she could do was listen as he talked about his abuelita’s life, her strength, her legacy, as a woman and a community organizer and an asylum seeker and a mother and grandmother. He had always felt safe with her, even when he was unsafe at home. He felt sick at the thought that he had filled her final days with anxiety and uncertainty, the kind his abuelita described feeling when she came to America, the kind he felt now. 

Olivia consoled him, convinced him to shower and eat and shave, although she liked the way the stubble looked and the way it felt against her face. She took care of him, brought him back to life, in a way they both knew too well. She had taken care of him like this after Alex Muñoz was arraigned, and after Micha Green had been killed and Evie Barnes had gone missing. He had taken care of her like this when she was cleared of William Lewis’s murder, and when Noah first came home. 

When they crawled into his bed that night, he turned to face her and said regretfully, “I don’t think we got around to any of your Valentine’s Day plans.”

“That’s okay, baby,” she whispered, her hand reaching up to stroke his face. “I just wanted to spend time with you. I needed a reminder.”

“Of what?” he asked. 

She reached between them and grabbed his hand, then pulled it to her face and kissed it. “This. Us. That there’s intimacy between us, and that just because it’s secret, and fucking hard, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” 

“It’s real,” he said. “Of course it’s real.”

She kissed his fingers again. 

“I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day,” he whispered to her in the dark after a few moments of silence. “Not since high school.” With Yelina, she remembered, but neither of them wanted to say her name, to invoke her memory in their intimate moment.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because I’ve never had anything like this.” She reached up to kiss him, and he continued, “I've never loved someone like this, or trusted someone like this. Like I love you and trust you. It's a secret, for now, and I know this month has been hard, but you're the realest part of my life. This is the realest thing I’ve ever felt.”

Olivia was tired of missing him, and tired of thinking about missing him. So she kissed him, and held him, and put the secrets and the distance and the future out of her mind. They spent their first Valentine’s Day planning and whispering and making love well into the early hours of the morning. It was theirs to share, and theirs alone. Secrets weren’t always such a bad thing, she remembered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place during and after Season 16, Episode 16, December Solstice. Olivia's face during the scene in which she meets Lucia is GOLD, and she's 0% subtle about checking him out as he walks away. I have at least two more fluff-ish chapters coming before the angst happens. I watched Bojack Horseman and listened to Raùl's voice saying sweet wonderful things, and it made me want to meander through these happy chapters a little longer.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olivia and Rafael's family is tested.

Rafael stood outside Noah’s hospital room in the pediatric ICU, watching him breathe. He’d done this dozens of times before, when Noah had pneumonia, or when Rafael woke up from a nightmare, or when he felt a wash of love and pride and protectiveness too powerful to let go of, to look away from. It was Sunday night. Trudi Malko and Dr. Eric Setrakian would be arraigned the next morning for reckless endangerment and falsifying vaccination records, and he needed to get home, to sleep in his own bed instead of a plastic chair, to shower and change and make himself presentable for court the next day. But he stayed rooted to the spot outside Noah’s room, watching his chest rise and fall. He had done the same thing just a week ago, but so much had changed since then.

On the previous Sunday night, Rafael had slipped Noah’s feet into the bottom of his pajama pants and shimmied them up past his chubby baby legs and dimply baby knees. He quietly hummed to make the boy smile, but he didn’t sing—singing might make him laugh. There was an art to getting Noah to sleep: if Rafael was too serious, all business, distracted or too tired, Noah would want to cry all night, out of loneliness and fear and another feeling too heartbreaking to name; if he was too silly, Noah would want to play and sing and smile all night, and Rafael might just let him. But Noah was going to get his vaccines tomorrow, and all three of the members of his household needed a good night’s sleep to prepare. 

So Rafael had fed him, and read with him, given him a bath and combed his hair and rubbed him down with baby lotion while Olivia finished responding to emails and preparing for the week. Now it was time to get Noah dressed and go to bed, and this was the part that was tricky. When Noah’s pajama pants were secure on his tiny legs, Rafael pulled a shirt over his head, quickly and playfully, so he wouldn’t fuss. As he tucked each arm into a sleeve and pulled through, he switched his humming to something more soothing, something a little too fitting from _Hamilton_ that would make him blush if Liv heard it. The baby yawned and his head dipped involuntarily forward, pressing his face against Rafael’s shoulder, and he melted, pacing and rocking him gently until the song was over and sleep finally took hold. 

Finally, when Noah’s breaths became deeper and more even, Rafael laid the baby down and stood by the crib for a few moments, watching his chest rise and fall, listening for the little whistle of air from his nose. When he was sure Noah would stay down, he crept down the hall and into the living room, where Olivia sat unwinding, wearing a cardigan and the reading glasses he found utterly irresistible, with a glass of wine and a book. 

“One bedtime ritual down,” he said as he sank down next to her on the couch. He raised his eyebrows. “One to go?”

Victorian literature and a glass of wine before bed was one of Olivia’s favorite ways to relax, either when her day had been unpleasant or when she was anticipating something unpleasant yet to come. They’d had a wonderful, quiet, lazy Sunday at home together, so he assumed the latter. “You worried about going to the doctor, mi amor?” he asked, leaning over to nuzzle her neck. 

“Not really,” she said, moving her index finger to mark her spot in her book before turning her head to kiss his hair. “I just hate it when he cries. He’s been to the doctor so many times, and he hates it.”

“I know,” Rafael said. “But you’ll be there to make it better.” He was selfishly glad Olivia was the one required to take Noah to finish catching up on his vaccination schedule. He wasn’t sure he would be able to keep himself from crying when Noah did. 

When he’d started coming around— _almost a year ago, Jesus,_ he thought—to offer assistance with the care and keeping of Noah, it had taken him about thirty seconds alone with the baby before he realized he was going to become painfully, irrevocably attached. Something in Noah’s face called to him, spoke to a part of his heart that had never before seen the sun. He fell in love, the kind of fierce, irrationally protective, all-consuming love that felt like he would never stop falling. He told himself he was vigilant, engaged, conscientious. Liv said he was a sucker, and that a nearly sixteen-month-old baby had him wrapped around his finger. He never argued. He didn't think it was such a bad thing.

He felt a rush of gratefulness for the woman beside him, for the patchwork family they’d become. When he looked up at her from where he had nestled his head on her shoulder, she looked tense, the skin around her mouth and eyes drawn tight. He hoisted himself up off the couch and stood behind Olivia. He pulled her hair off her shoulders, savoring the feeling of the silky strands against his fingertips. She had great hair. It was the first thing he’d noticed about her when they’d first met, when he’d made that stupid quip about “take your daughters to work day.” He placed his hands on her shoulders, rubbing, kneading, thumbing, caressing. She rolled her neck and hummed in pleasure. “That feels nice,” she murmured. 

“I can make you feel nicer,” he murmured back in her ear, because it was what she expected from him, and she laughed. 

So he took her to the bathroom, to unwind her even further pressed up against the wall of the shower. (He liked the shower; Olivia liked the bath. For some reason, neither of them minded too much when it was their turn to compromise.)

When the water was starting to run cold, they toweled off and got ready for bed, but before they crawled under the blankets, they both found their way over to Noah’s crib, to watch him breathe just a little longer.

He left her apartment early Monday morning, and spent most of the day catching up on paperwork. Liv sent him a photo of her and Noah smiling at the doctor’s office, a lollipop in Noah’s tiny fist, and he smiled through most of his afternoon. It was quiet, and he was grateful, although he knew it wouldn’t last. He was right.

He was almost ready to leave for the night Monday evening when Olivia sent Rollins and Carisi to determine whether a crime had been committed at Tribeca Academy’s off-campus rainbow party. The photos Carisi showed him from the party were just over the line, and he knew his recommendation to collect every phone from every student in the school was harsh. He might not have reacted so strongly before Noah, before he had to think about what kind of life he might have led if Liv had never found him in that hotel room, in the custody of child abusers and pornographers. Now it was all he could think about when he came across cases like this. He spent the rest of the night communicating with school officials about the phone collection details, eating takeout in his office and trying to stave off a headache. When it started to feel like too much, he got his phone out, pulled the picture up. He smiled.

Tuesday morning, he was fielding excruciating calls from outraged Tribeca parents when his phone lit up with Olivia’s name. “Liv,” he answered, feeling some of the tension drain from his shoulders when he said her name. 

“Noah was exposed to measles.”

“What?”

“Measles. At the doctor’s office,” she clarified. Her voice sounded strangled, too high. His own throat restricted at the panic in her voice.

“Is he sick?” He opened a new tab on his laptop and typed the word “measles” into the search window, then furiously closed the window when he saw the images of rashes and bumps, the news articles about an epidemic. 

“We don’t know yet. He’s being quarantined in the apartment for the next eight days, maybe longer.”

He pictured Olivia willing herself not to cry, squinting her eyes, drawing a breath in through her nose and pushing it out slowly through nearly-pursed lips. “Do you need me to come home?” he asked. He silently begged her to say yes. 

He heard her slow breath through the line. “No,” she said. “He doesn’t have any symptoms yet. It could be nothing. We’re getting pushback about the phone collection.”

“You’re telling me,” he said as his office phone started ringing again. He ignored it. Softer, he asked, “What do you need?”

She sighed. “These parents have friends in high places. I’m going to try working from home, but if you can take the meetings from those parents alone, I won’t have to leave Noah. I’ll call Lucy to help, just in case.”

“Liv, I can come—”

“You can’t, though.” She sighed. “I gotta go,” she interrupted him. “I need to call Fin.”

“Okay,” he said reluctantly, but she was already off the line.

He worked late. Everyone had mutually, silently agreed to hit this case hard, to wrap it up quickly, to spare Olivia as much stress and distraction as possible. He got warrants, communicated with parents, wrote himself a note to buy Carmen something _very_ nice for her birthday after she brought him water and a power bar when he requested his seventh cup of coffee. 

He was getting ready to leave on Wednesday when his phone rang for the fifty-seventh time that day, and he thought about throwing it out the window, but he answered it instead. Fin was calling to let him know that he had just rushed Olivia and Noah to the hospital. “I’m headed your way,” he said. “She asked for you.”

If Rafael or Olivia had any delusions that her squad didn’t know how they felt about each other, they disappeared the minute Rafael showed up outside Noah’s hospital room. He spent that night with Olivia in the chairs outside Noah’s observation room until Amaro came to relieve him at five in the morning. He hadn’t felt so helpless since the last time Olivia was taken. 

Thursday afternoon, Rollins told him that Trudi Malko and her doctor had falsified vaccination records on at least a dozen Tribeca Academy students, including the student whose younger brother had infected Noah. They’d spoken to other parents and the doctor who verified the conspiracy Arlene Heller had tipped them off to. Rollins drove him to the hospital once again, and they conferred with Olivia about how to proceed. Ultimately, Rollins offered to stay with Noah while they interviewed Trudi Malko. The conversation was fruitless, and frustrating, and Olivia cried hot, angry tears in the elevator as they left Malko’s apartment.

Friday morning, after they had finally managed to catch a few hours of sleep clinging to each other on hard plastic chairs, Rafael felt himself being tapped awake. He looked up, and Fin was standing over him. “I saw Noah’s case worker waiting for an elevator downstairs. Go get some coffee, Counselor.” 

His eyes widened, and he extracted himself from Olivia’s grip. Fin sat down next to her and talked to her quietly, gently, easing her into their painful reality. He wanted to thank him, but the look in Fin’s eyes told him it wasn’t necessary, or even welcome.

He went into the office to request an arrest warrant for Dr. Eric Setrakian and Trudi Malko. They were picked up late enough that they wouldn’t be arraigned until Monday, and he had the weekend to prepare.

He spent it in the hospital, watching Noah breathe. Watching Olivia sleep. The case against Trudi Malko hinged on jurors not buying into her pseudo-science, so he researched and contacted a slew of expert witnesses. It was going to be a long trial. Olivia was going to have to testify, and he hated that. He wished he could recuse himself. He felt too tired, too close, too raw for this case. He also felt like it was the only way he could protect his boy. He didn’t trust anyone else to do it.

Someone walked up next to him, and he knew without looking that it was Olivia. She leaned her head against his shoulder and linked her arm through his. “You’re going gray, Counselor. Have you not been sleeping well?”

He snorted. “I wonder why.”

She ran a hand through his hair, then linked their fingers together. “I like the gray.”

He smiled. “What did Dr. Lee say?” 

She blew out a breath. “No change.” She pressed her forehead into his shoulder. After a long moment, she whispered, “Tell me we’re not here.”

“We’re not here. We’ll be home soon.”

“Tell me it’s okay.”

“It’s okay. He’s okay.” He kissed the top of her head. “He’s going to get through this, and then this summer, we’re going to go to the zoo and look at the elephants every single day.” 

“He loves elephants,” she said.

“Oh, I know,” he responded. “He’s going to see so many elephants he’ll think he’s being raised by them.”

She smiled, then sniffed and dabbed her eyes. They heard a throat clear behind them. Amaro handed off dinner (from Carisi, for the both of them, he said,) then excused himself to the restroom. “I think he might know something’s going on between us,” Rafael stage whispered as he walked away, and Olivia laughed. They turned back to Noah. “Did he and Rollins ever disclose?” 

“No,” Olivia said. “You can’t really blame them. He’s still married to Maria.” Noah’s arm moved in his sleep, and they both shifted to get a better view. But he settled, and his chest continued to rise and fall. “I don’t think that’s still going on, anyway.”

He wondered what happened between them, then considered that maybe nothing had to happen. They were friends, and colleagues, and it was complicated. Maybe they decided to quit while they were still ahead.

“What do you think about the case against Trudi Malko?” she asked. 

“It’s strong,” he answered. “Getting stronger all the time. Expert witnesses love to testify about this bullshit.”

She was holding his hand, and he remembered how that used to ground him and comfort him a lifetime ago, at the bar after hard cases, when she’d ultimately go home to someone else. It comforted him now. He hoped it comforted her too. “We’re going to bring him home,” he reminded her. “Together. He’s getting stronger and healthier and he’s going to come home.”

Noah's condition got better, then worse, then better again. It was the most terrifying month of their lives. Rafael stood helplessly outside his door as they tried different antibiotics, carted him off for X-rays, as doctors and nurses listened to him breathe. He prosecuted Trudi Malko, and he won, for whatever it was worth. Two days after her sentencing, just over a month after Noah was exposed to measles in his pediatrician’s office, he came home. 

Rafael and Olivia stood over his crib while he slept all night, watching him breathe, holding hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place during Season 16, Episode 19, Granting Immunity. DadBarba was too much to resist. He's humming Dear Theodosia here, but I was so embarrassed by how sappy that was that I couldn't bring myself to actually write it.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olivia and Rafael's relationship jeopardizes an important case.

When Olivia was twelve years old, her mother "accidentally" pushed her down half a flight of stairs. She wasn’t hurt in a way that wasn’t normal for her, but Serena was shaken up by the sight of her daughter at the bottom of the stairwell, and when Olivia got home from school the next day, there was a silver, long-eared rabbit in a shiny white cage on her desk in her room. 

Her rabbit was small and spirited, and Olivia fell in love for the first time as he took his first tentative sniffs of her hand, before letting her scratch him between the ears. She watched him explore, adventure, trust. She held him to her chest when she heard a bottle break, or that weepy vinyl record start to play in the next room. She scared him once, and he scratched her, and she felt guilty for getting her blood on his pretty silver fur.

Three months later, after another, smaller push that Serena wasn't sorry for, Olivia came home from school, and her rabbit was gone. When she asked her mother where he was, Serena pretended that he’d never existed at all. 

That’s what Olivia Benson knew about love. It was an apology that could be taken back. It was a familiar smell that used to make her happy, but now it made her cry. It was an empty desk that she couldn’t bring herself to fill. 

Something else she knew about love was that it liked to prove her right. When she needed Alex Cabot, but Alex didn’t need her back. When the cards and letters from Calvin stopped coming. When she called Simon’s number after not hearing from him for months, and it was out of service. When she realized Elliot was never, ever coming back, not even for her, not even to say goodbye. She learned, over and over, that hope was the thing with feathers, and love was the little boy with a slingshot and a cold glint in his eye. 

She’d let herself forget what she knew about love for the past year. The love she felt for Noah was a kind of love she’d never felt before. It was different—it made her a different person. She told herself she wasn’t the woman who got left behind anymore. She told herself that this time love wouldn’t leave.

And Barba, who was always right. He loved her like she’d never been loved before, and she was hurting him. When she told him that she was naming Johnny D as Noah’s birth father, she saw his shoulders sag, his eyes turn sad and sorry. He didn’t want him to know. They both knew what it was like to live with the legacy of a monster for a father. He didn’t want that for her son, who was his son in his heart, if not on paper. 

And then she hurt him again, when he brought her the deal, Johnny’s parental rights waived in exchange for a lesser sentence, and she’d told him no. “You could be taking your son to visit Johnny D in prison until Noah turns eighteen,” he told her, almost frantically, and she knew what he meant. She knew what she was taking away from him. There was a chance Johnny D would always be Noah’s legal father. There was a chance Rafael would never have that choice. 

Sitting on the witness stand, she couldn’t remember why she’d done it. She handed Johnny D his defense. She tried not to look at his face, but when she did, he looked like he’d already won. She saw none of Noah’s sweetness, none of his curiosity, none of his love. He _wasn’t_ Noah’s father. She couldn’t remember why this arbitrary truth had meant so much to her, only days ago. She would take it all back if she could.

She was thinking about all of this outside the courtroom, as cameras flashed and reporters yelled and her squad all lied to her to avoid saying the thing her heart knew. She'd been prideful, and idealistic, and she might have cost Noah his life, Ariel and Nina and Pilar and Jesse their peace of mind. She was thinking about the spot on her desk where her rabbit used to live. She thought about Noah’s empty crib in her room. “Liv, stairs,” Barba said, his hand on her back, guiding her, then pushing her toward the back exit of the courthouse, away from reporters and onlookers and Johnny D’s brutal reminder that she could still be broken by love. 

They went down one flight, then another, practically flying. Barba was talking to her, reassuring her, she was sure, but she couldn’t make out the words. She remembered the stairs her mother pushed her down, the way every nerve and synapse in her body seemed to snap all at once when she hit bottom. 

Her feet stuttered to a halt at a landing, and she pushed herself down into the corner of the wall. The floor was grubby, but she didn’t care. She threw herself down into the dirt. Barba stood over her, then sank down to crouch next to her, to cover her and console her. 

“I’m so sorry, Liv,” he breathed, an arm around her back and a hand on her face. 

Love was an apology that could be taken back. 

“I shouldn’t have listed him on the adoption papers,” she croaked. 

“You did what you had to do.”

“You told me it was a mistake.”

“Since when have you listened to me?”

“You should have taken the deal.”

“It was a bad deal. Those girls deserve better. Noah deserves better.”

_“He’s going to take my son,”_ she choked out. Her voice rang out in the stairwell, like the echoes were agreeing with her, affirming her worst fears. Love was a fight she always lost.

“Olivia,” he pleaded. He was grasping her shoulders. His face looked strained, desperate, alien. He whispered to her. His whispers didn’t echo. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “We’ll get him. We have him. He’s not going to take your son.”

Olivia sobbed into her hands, and he shifted to sit down next to her and pull her into his arms. She cried into his neck as he kissed her face and hair, ran his hands along her arms, whispered to her in a mixture of English and Spanish that was lyrical, soothing, the way he talked to Noah when he wouldn’t go back to sleep. 

Somewhere in her body, alarm bells were going off. A photo of them like this could cause a mistrial. It could cost them their jobs. Reporters were everywhere, and where there weren’t reporters, there were judges, defense attorneys, other ADAs. They needed to get up, get out, get away. 

As if he sensed her thoughts, Rafael held her tighter. He brought his lips to her ear and said clearly, “I love you. Noah loves you. Nothing else matters. It’s okay to be scared, but it’s not okay to give up. Your son needs us to keep fighting for him. He needs us to win.”

Love was a fight she always lost. Love was a broken promise. Love left her behind.

It didn’t matter. She fell in love anyway. Again and again, after heartbreak and humiliation and reckless abandonment, she fell. She’d never fallen as hard as she had with Noah. She’d never believed someone’s promises like she believed Rafael’s. If she was going to be an idiot and believe in love, believing in him was her best option. She wiped her eyes and stood up just as she heard the door to the stairwell open above them. She led the way down, down. 

She didn’t snap this time when she hit bottom. 

When Olivia was twenty-two years old, fate grabbed her by the collar and dragged her to an adoption fair, and she accidentally brought home a dog. He had shiny silver fur, and he loved being scratched between his long, floppy ears. He was patient and faithful, and he helped her explore, adventure, trust. She held him to her chest after her first fatal call, and on nights when she felt small and vulnerable and alone in a city of men who wanted to hurt, maim, kill. He was her best and most loyal friend, and he taught her that love could be easy.

But it still hurt. It didn't always mean to, but love always hurt. He was already six when she found him at the animal shelter’s pet adoption drive, and he greeted her every day at her apartment door until her twenty-seventh birthday, when his heart gave out from loving her too faithfully. Love meant leaving too soon. When Serena asked at dinner that weekend why Olivia had been crying, she at least had the courtesy to bite back whatever hateful observation had been on the tip of her tongue. 

Olivia learned then that sometimes, love was biting your tongue.

Olivia and Rafael sat at a tiny table at a bar that wasn’t their usual, drinking whiskey and barely holding it together, anxious for the weekend to be over and the trial to resume. Everything was going wrong. They’d hoped against hoping that Barba could keep Noah’s parentage out of Johnny Drake’s defense, but it kept creeping up in the worst ways. When she asked him about it, he went white. “Braun accused both of us of having a conflict of interest. He asked when I found out that Johnny D was Noah’s father. If I fought it too hard, he could ask both of us questions that we couldn’t answer on the stand, that would destroy the case. I thought he and Judge Barth might have suspected something. I had to drop it.”

_Lying doesn’t really work out for me,_ she remembered telling him, but she bit her tongue to keep herself from saying it again, because she loved him, and she didn’t want to call their love a lie. She wondered for the first time in a long time if love for them would mean leaving too soon, too. If all their faith and feeling wasn’t enough.

That was a question for another time, she reminded herself. Timmer was dead. Selena was a murderer who would never see her son again, Olivia thought with a pang of unexpected sympathy. Pilar lied on the stand, because she was scared, and Olivia understood the instinct, even if she couldn’t forgive it. Rafael sat across from her, reading her emotions, asking her to trust him, and she tried. Still, she couldn’t help but steel herself against what was coming. She waited for love to do what it always did: to take back its apology, to hurt, to leave.

But it didn’t. This time it wouldn’t, she realized weeks later after Noah’s adoption party, as she picked up cups and wrapping paper and cupcake wrappers around her apartment while Rafael collected dishes right beside her. Noah was adopted. She would always be his mother. Johnny Drake would never hurt him. Love lived here, in this apartment, with her little family that she got to keep.   
Olivia was finally ready to admit that she didn’t know as much about love as she thought she did. She was still learning what it meant, what it could do.

Love was Noah’s eyelashes fluttering against his soft cheeks, his tiny exhausted body tucked tightly into his new toddler bed. Love was Nick telling her he was leaving the job, leaving the city, but he wasn’t leaving her. Love was the overtime request forms she signed after the trial, when she realized that her squad had barely gone home to eat or sleep, for her, because they were family. 

Love happened later, when Rafael asked her if she would ever want to be married to him, and it was the first time in her life she could say yes and mean it. She couldn’t love him more, couldn’t trust him more than she already did. She still couldn’t see a way to get there from here—after a year of loving him in secret, she didn’t know what it would look like to love him in the light. There was still a quiet part of her that thought they wouldn’t be able to make it work, but even that part knew that she would always love him, that he would never stop loving her. She kissed him just below his ear and marveled at the way the hair at his temples was turning silver. Love was in the promises he made, to protect her son, to keep her safe and happy. The promises he kept. 

Love took its time with Olivia. It wove in and out of her life, teaching her, breaking her, building her up stronger and smarter than before. Her life with Noah and Rafael was complicated, but her love wasn’t.

Love wasn’t an apology that could be taken back. Love was forgiveness for every broken heart that led you to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a little stuck and not sure how to feel about this chapter but I had to move on to something else. Olivia is starting to experience real doubts about the future of their relationship and that bums me out. This episode was so good for my shipper's heart though, and Barba's facial expressions are everything. Oh also, I have no idea if these flashback-adjacent scenes are canon compliant.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rafael makes plans.

Rafael was thinking about leaving.

It was late, and he was bone tired, and that was surely contributing to the voice in his head that was telling him something had to change. He had taken a car straight to Olivia’s apartment after working a twelve-hour day, and he didn’t have time to stop and pick up clothes or eat before Lucy had to be off to another job. Olivia was at a benefit for an NYPD charity with Dodds, and she didn’t know how late she’d be. She hated missing Noah’s bedtime, but Dodds had promised her news about her lieutenant’s exam if she came, and the suspense was killing them both. 

_She should be home by now_ , he thought, but that was the exhaustion talking. There was no predicting Olivia’s schedule. Sometimes he swore she was in two places at once. 

Rafael had a feeling Dodds expected a little more out of the evening than he’d mentioned when he pitched it to Olivia, and he’d been on edge about it all night. She couldn’t exactly beg off drinks with someone from work by saying that she was seeing someone, and the invitations were always under the guise of professional interest. It frustrated him when he heard that her superiors and other officers were putting her in that position, making an obvious play for a date that they could pretend she had misinterpreted if she told them she wasn’t interested. She was effectively trapped by professional decorum, and he knew that’s what those assholes in the NYPD, like Dodds, and sometimes Tucker, were counting on. It also frustrated him that he couldn’t wrap a possessive arm around her waist when he saw them eyeing her, but that was a baser instinct he wasn’t proud of, and he ignored it when he could. 

He wanted to wait up for her, to ask her about her night and, he admitted to himself, assuage the pebble of jealousy lodged in his shoe. But it was so late, and he was still exhausted, and he would have to leave early to stop by his apartment and get fresh clothes before work the next day. 

_It would be so much easier if I lived here,_ he thought, and that wasn’t new. They’d both thought about it, groaned about it when the inconvenience of their situation made itself known. He didn’t live far, but when it meant sacrificing breakfast with Noah, or much-needed sleep, or a few stolen moments in the shower with Olivia before work, it was a bitter pill. 

“Are you coming home tonight?” Olivia would ask him sometimes, and he knew she meant her apartment, not his. His apartment didn’t feel like home anymore. Sometimes when he swung by in the mornings to shower and shave, he half-expected there to be a layer of dust covering all the unused relics of his old life. He used to love his Manhattan apartment, with big closets and a beautiful view, but lately it felt like a reminder of how lonely he was when he spent all his nights there. He would give anything for home to mean Olivia’s place, in Olivia’s arms, every night. 

_Anything?_ he asked himself, but he knew the answer. And he knew exactly that he would have to give up to make that happen. 

He was thinking his first real thoughts about leaving when his phone went off, and Olivia’s name showed up on his screen. 

“You on your way?” he asked without preamble.

“Unfortunately, no,” she replied. He could hear the exhaustion in her voice, mirroring his. “We caught a case. An unattended child walked into a convenience store. We can’t figure out who he is or where his parents are. I’m at the hospital waiting for the doctors to finish examining him. I would’ve called you sooner, but Dodds… _insisted_ on giving me a ride.”

“Is the boy hurt?” he asked, blowing past the comment about her chief and the sour feeling it left in his belly. 

“No, he’s not hurt,” she said. “Not visibly. He’s neglected, and nonverbal so far.”

“That’s tough, Liv. Do you know when you’ll be home?” he asked. _Home,_ he thought. Her home, not his. _It would be so much easier._

“I’m waiting for an on-call ACS case worker to take him to a group home or an emergency foster placement. It could be hours,” she said apologetically. “How’s Noah?”

“Fast asleep,” he said. “No problems. I’ll send you a picture.” Child abuse cases were hard enough for her without the added stress of missing Noah. 

“Thanks,” she said, but she still sounded disappointed. “The doctor’s back, I have to go.” She hung up before he could respond. 

He finished his drink in one long gulp, packed his notes away, and crept down the dark hallway to Noah’s room. He snapped a photo of his peaceful sleeping face by the light of his star-shaped nightlight before retreating into Olivia’s room and getting dressed for bed. 

If he transferred out of SVU, they could disclose. Everything would open up for them after that. He could move in, or they could find a new place together. He could tell his mother, and stop sweating every time she asked questions about his personal life. They could get married, and he could petition to adopt Noah. It had been over a year of impossible hurdles and secrets and stresses, and they’d never doubted each other. It was time for a more permanent solution. He let himself imagine what that would look like, and it carried him into peaceful dreams. 

He heard her key in the lock around three, and instead of coming right to bed, she’d spent what felt like a long time in Noah’s room, watching him sleep. He was almost back to sleep himself when she finally crawled into bed and pressed herself up against him tightly. The next morning, he woke up before Olivia, kissing her lightly on the forehead before leaving in yesterday’s clothes and heading to his apartment, then into his office. 

His mind wandered all through his meeting with the DA, and he still couldn’t focus on anything by lunch. On a whim, he dialed Rita’s number. 

“Barba,” she answered. “What did you do now?”

“Lunch?” he asked. 

“Can’t. I’m swamped. What’s up?”

He sighed. “When did you know it was time to leave?” he asked. 

“Leave what? The DA’s office? When Esperanza owed more in medical bills than our apartment was worth,” Rita said flippantly, but there was an edge. “Why? Are you leaving? I’ll pay you triple what you make there.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Then why are you wasting my time with this pointless conversation?”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m _thinking_ about leaving. Maybe transferring.”

“So you can tell Benson you love her?” Rita teased. 

As far as she was concerned, he had an unspoken crush on Olivia. She didn’t know what was between them—she couldn’t, and probably didn’t want to. She’d have to use it against them if she did. 

He didn’t deny her accusation, but he didn’t confirm it either, despite knowing she’d hit dangerously close to the truth. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “I knew it was time to leave when I was thinking about Anza in court, and I was thinking about court in her hospital room. When I felt like I couldn’t be an advocate for my wife and for the victims at the same time. The line is different for everyone, I guess, but that was mine. And since I was giving up doing what I loved for money… I decided I’d better make some goddamn great money. And learn to love that.”

“So you sold your soul,” he said, teasing her back, ignoring the wistfulness that had crept into her voice.

“Whatever, Barba,” she snapped, all business again. “If I’m not good at my job, yours means nothing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to meet with a client whose suit cost more than your annual salary.” She hung up. 

He wasn’t sure how helpful her advice was, but it was nice to know he wasn’t the only one who thought the choice was hard. He did think about Benson in court, and about court with Benson, but that made sense. Her fingerprints were on every part of his life. He liked that about his life. If he requested a transfer to homicide, or juvenile court, would that change? 

He’d never have dreamt of it three years ago. He worked in SVU in Brooklyn because he found out he was good at it, and it got his name in the papers, and it was a stepping stone to public office, maybe a judgeship. But he’d buried that dream along with Alex Muñoz’s political career. He didn’t need the publicity anymore. He didn’t think he would miss it. Not the way he missed Olivia when he woke up in his apartment, alone. The voice in his head, telling him it was time to leave, got louder, and more insistent.

The case didn’t help. He hated it. He hated the way Dodds and slimy Hank fucking Abraham called Olivia off like a trained dog. He hated the evidence photos of Keisha Ozuna’s tiny, broken body, and finding Olivia crying about it quietly in the middle of the night. He hated cross-referencing fabricated ACS visit reports with police reports about children being burned with cigarettes and forced to drink bleach. 

And halfway through the trial, he realized it wasn’t Olivia he was thinking about in court. That wasn’t the problem. It was Noah. 

If something happened to Olivia (God forbid, but he knew the statistics), what would happen to Noah? Was this the system he’d go back into? He stood in open court, presenting evidence, and he couldn’t help but see Noah’s face, his helpless frame in his hospital room. His voice broke, his eyes swam. 

When he went home ( _not home, Olivia’s_ ) to Noah that night, all he could think about was how many kids weren’t lucky like him. He remembered the trip they took over Memorial Day, just three days a tiny coastal town. It was too cold to swim, but they took a long walk on the beach on their first night. It was Noah’s first time seeing the ocean, and he loved it, but he was afraid. He held tightly to both their hands the whole time. 

They went back to their hotel room that night and read stories about sea creatures. Noah fell asleep during Finding Nemo, and Rafael found himself getting weepy at the father fish’s desperate attempts to protect his son. Olivia teased him playfully, then they snuck into the bathroom so she could tease him some more.

The trip was ostensibly for their anniversary, his and Olivia’s, but really it was an anniversary for the three of them. They’d been a family for a year. But he couldn’t deny anymore that the secrecy was putting his family in danger. Olivia loved SVU, and he loved Olivia. There was an opening in major crimes. 

He knew it was time to leave.

After the case was closed, and Olivia came home from visiting Bruno Ozuna in his foster home, Rafael sat her down to tell her. He wasn’t sure how she’d take it—breaking in an ADA was hard, and they both knew no one else would let her get away with half of what he did.

“I think we need to talk,” he said.

“Nope,” Olivia responded.

He raised his eyebrows. “I’m sorry?”

“Nope. No talking. Whiskey, bad TV, maybe a bath.” She met his eyes then, and he saw the toll the week had taken on her. He knew about the sleepless nights, the political pressure, the horrific research. Winning didn’t change what happened to Bruno, and Keisha, and all those other kids. There was something else that had been bothering her, too, but he couldn’t place it just then. “I got some news today, and I’m not sure whether it was good or bad. I’m still processing. I just can’t do any more talking right now.”

She leaned into him and turned on the TV, and he let her settle into his arms. He didn’t realize how much they’d been missing each other, and the weight of her against him felt too good for words. He needed to get used to the idea, anyway, and the process of transferring would probably take a while. _I’m really leaving,_ he thought.

There would be time for talking later on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place during and immediately following the events of Season 17, Episode 4, Institutional Fail. It also precedes the events of chapter 5 of A One-Time Thing by about a week. Sorry about this one.


End file.
